The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution 9780199695898, 019969589X

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of The English Revolution
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Part I Introduction
1 Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland
2 Post-Reformation Politics, or on Not Looking for the Long-Term Causes of the English Civil War
Part II Events
3 The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644
4 The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642
5 The Irish Rising
6 War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646
7 Scottish Politics, 1644–1651
8 The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649
9 The Regicide
10 Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658
11 English Politics in the 1650s
12 The Restoration in Britain and Ireland
Part III Institutions and actors
13 Oliver Cromwell
14 Parliaments and Constitutions
15 The Armies
16 The Revolution in Print
17 State and Society in the English Revolution
18 Urban Citizens and England’s Civil Wars
19 Crowds and Popular Politics in the English Revolution
20 ‘Gender Trouble’: Women’s Agency and Gender Relations in the English Revolution
21 State, Politics, and Society in Scotland, 1637–1660
22 State, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1641–1662
Part IV Parties, ideas, and people
23 The Persistence of Royalism
24 Varieties of Parliamentarianism
25 Political Thought
26 Religious Thought
27 ‘May you Live in Interesting Times’: The Literature of Civil War, Revolution, and Restoration
28 The Art and Architecture of War, Revolution, and Restoration
Part V Wider perspectives
29 The Long-term Consequences of the English Revolution: Economic and Social Development
30 The Long-term Consequences of the English Revolution: State Formation, Political Culture, and Ideology
31 Cultural Legacies: The English Revolution in Nineteenth-Century British and French Literature and Art
32 The English Revolution in British and Irish Context
33 Kingdom Divided: The British and Continental European Conflicts Compared
Index

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

T H E E N G L I SH R E VOLU T ION

The Oxford Handbook of

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION Edited by

MICHAEL J. BRADDICK

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930593 ISBN 978–0–19–969589–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy Cover image: Map of the British Isles with battle ships in the North Sea, and a view of Prague and the Battle of the White Mountain of 1620, comparing the English and Bohemian Civil Wars. Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar c. 1659 © The Trustees of the British Museum Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors  Acknowledgements 

ix xi xv

PA RT I   I N T ROD U C T ION   1. Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland  Michael J. Braddick 2. Post-Reformation Politics, or on Not Looking for the Long-Term Causes of the English Civil War  Peter Lake

3

21

PA RT I I   E V E N T S   3. The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644  Julian Goodare

43

4. The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642  Richard Cust

60

5. The Irish Rising  Joseph Cope

77

6. War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646  Michael J. Braddick

96

7. Scottish Politics, 1644–1651  Laura A. M. Stewart

114

8. The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649  Micheál Ó Siochrú

137

9. The Regicide  Philip Baker

154

vi   Contents

10. Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658  Derek Hirst

170

11. English Politics in the 1650s  David L. Smith

186

12. The Restoration in Britain and Ireland  Tim Harris

204

PA RT I I I   I N ST I T U T ION S A N D AC TOR S   13. Oliver Cromwell  J. C. Davis

223

14. Parliaments and Constitutions  David L. Smith

243

15. The Armies  Andrew Hopper

260

16. The Revolution in Print  Jason Peacey

276

17. State and Society in the English Revolution  Stephen K. Roberts

294

18. Urban Citizens and England’s Civil Wars  Phil Withington

312

19. Crowds and Popular Politics in the English Revolution  John Walter

330

20. ‘Gender Trouble’: Women’s Agency and Gender Relations in the English Revolution  Ann Hughes

347

21. State, Politics, and Society in Scotland, 1637–1660  R. Scott Spurlock

363

22. State, Politics, and Society in Ireland, 1641–1662  Toby Barnard

379

Contents   vii

PA RT I V   PA RT I E S , I DE A S , A N D P E OP L E 23. The Persistence of Royalism  Alan Cromartie

397

24. Varieties of Parliamentarianism  Rachel Foxley

414

25. Political Thought  Ted Vallance

430

26. Religious Thought  John Coffey

447

27. ‘May you Live in Interesting Times’: The Literature of Civil War, Revolution, and Restoration Steven N. Zwicker 28. The Art and Architecture of War, Revolution, and Restoration  Timothy Wilks

466 483

PA RT V   W I DE R P E R SP E C T I V E S   29. The Long-term Consequences of the English Revolution: Economic and Social Development John Miller

501

30. The Long-term Consequences of the English Revolution: State Formation, Political Culture, and Ideology Mark Knights

518

31. Cultural Legacies: The English Revolution in Nineteenth-Century British and French Literature and Art Laura Lunger Knoppers

535

32. The English Revolution in British and Irish Context  John Morrill

555

33. Kingdom Divided: The British and Continental European Conflicts Compared  Peter H. Wilson

577

Index 

597

List of Illustrations 31.1 31.2 31.3

Paul Delaroche, Cromwell opens the coffin of King Charles I (1831) The High and Mighty Monarch Charles. Portrait of Charles I, wearing lace collar and chain (ca. 1640s) Olivarius Cromwell Exercituum Angliae Reipublicae Dux Generalis. Portrait of Cromwell on horseback, with the Thames and a view of London in background (c. 1655)

539 541 542

Notes on Contributors

Philip Baker is a Research Fellow at the History of Parliament Trust, London, and Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham. He is the editor of The Levellers: the Putney Debates (2007), the co-editor of The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (2012), and the author of a number of articles and essays on the civil war period and the history of early modern London. Toby Barnard emeritus fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, is the author of Cromwellian Ireland (reprinted, 2000); A New Anatomy of Ireland (2003) and Improving Ireland? (2008). Michael J. Braddick  is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. He has published extensively on state formation, popular politics and the English civil war. His most recent book is God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008). John Coffey  is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. He has published widely on Puritan thought in the English Revolution. He is also the author of Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (2000), and Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr (2013) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008). With Neil Keeble, Tim Cooper, and Thomas Charlton he is currently working on a critical edition of Baxter’s memoir, Reliquiae Baxterianae, for Oxford University Press. Joseph Cope  is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the State University of New York at Geneseo, where he has taught since 2001. He is the author of England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion (2009) and is currently working on a study of faith healers in during the mid-seventeenth century. Alan Cromartie  is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Reading. He is author of The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England (2006). Richard Cust  is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Birmingham. He has published a number of books and articles on early Stuart politics, including Charles I. A Political Life (2005) and Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625–1642 (2013).

xii   Notes on Contributors J. C. Davis  is Emeritus Professor of History, University of East Anglia and the author of an analytical study of Oliver Cromwell’s reputation (2001) as well as an influential essay on Cromwell’s religion. He has also written extensively on political thought, especially its radical varieties, in early modern England and, more generally, on the history of utopian thought. Rachel Foxley  lectures in early modern history at the University of Reading and is the author of The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (2013). Julian Goodare  is Reader in History, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (1999) and The Government of Scotland, 1560–1625 (2004). He is an Associate Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Tim Harris  has taught at Brown University since 1986, where he is currently MunroGoodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European History. His books include London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (1987), Politics under the Later Stuarts (1993), Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005), Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006), and Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567–1642 (2014). Derek Hirst  is William Eliot Smith Professor of History at Washington University, St Louis. During more than three decades in St Louis he has broadened his early focus on early Stuart politics. His recent publications include Dominion: England and its Island Neighbours c.1500–1707 (2012) and the co-authored Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (2012). Andrew Hopper  is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester and the author of ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (2007), and Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil Wars (2012). Ann Hughes  is Professor Emerita at Keele where she was Professor of Early Modern History until 2014. She is the author of many books and articles about the English Revolution, most recently Gender and the English Revolution (2011) and co-editor with Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein, The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009). Mark Knights  is Professor of History at Warwick University and has published extensively on early modern political culture, particularly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His most recent book is The Devil in Disguise: Delusion, Deception and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (2011) and he is now working on a study of early modern corruption, from Reformation to Reform. Laura Lunger Knoppers  is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She has published widely on seventeenth-century British literature, politics, religion, and visual culture, especially the works of John Milton. Most recently, she is the

Notes on Contributors    xiii author of Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011) and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (2012). Peter Lake is Distinguished University Professor of English history at Vanderbilt University. He has just completed a study of Shakespeare’s history plays and the politics of the 1590s and (with Isaac Stephens) a book on religious identity in pre-civil war Northamptonshire. He is also turning his 2011 Ford lectures into a book. John Miller  is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He has published extensively on late seventeenth-century English History, including more recently Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns 1660–1722 (2007); and A Brief History of the English Civil Wars (2009). John Morrill  was Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge 1998–2013 and he is a Life Fellow of Selwyn College Cambridge. He is the author of more than 100 books and essays on many aspects of early modern state formation, the politics of religion in the long seventeenth century, and on the life and faith of Oliver Cromwell. Micheál Ó Siochrú  is Associate Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of numerous books and articles on seventeenth-century Ireland, including God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (2009). He is currently working on a new edition of Oliver Cromwell’s letters and papers for Oxford University Press. Jason Peacey  is Professor of Early Modern British History at University College London. He is the editor of The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001), and the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers (2004), and of Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013). Stephen K. Roberts  is Editor of the House of Commons 1640–1660 Section of the History of Parliament. He has written extensively on aspects of regional government and society in England and Wales in this period, and is joint editor of Midland History and general editor of the Worcestershire Historical Society. David L. Smith is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His books include Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (1994), A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603–1707: The Double Crown (1998), The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689 (1999), and (with Patrick Little) Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (2007). R. Scott Spurlock  is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series ‘Christianities in the trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800’ and editor of The Records of the Scottish Church History Society. Laura A. M. Stewart  is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern British History at Birkbeck, University of London, and has published widely on many aspects of early modern

xiv   Notes on Contributors Scottish and British history. She has recently completed her second book, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Ted Vallance  is Professor of Early Modern British Political Culture at the University of Roehampton. He is the author of several books including Revolutionary England and the National Covenant (2005). He is currently working on a monograph on public opinion and loyal addressing in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. John Walter is Research Professor of History at the University of Essex. He has published widely on early modern protest and popular political culture, including Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (1999) and Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (2006). He is currently completing a book on state oaths in the English revolution, to be published by Oxford University Press. Timothy Wilks  is Professor of Cultural History at Southampton Solent University. His research interests include the patronage of artists, the history of collecting, and European court cultures. His recent publications include a biography of a lesser favourite of the early Stuart Court, Lord Dingwall, and a study of art plunder in the Thirty Years’ War. Peter H. Wilson  is G.F. Grant Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Hull, having previously worked at Newcastle and Sunderland universities. His book Europe’s Tragedy. The Thirty Years War won the Society for Military History’s Distinguish Book Award in 2011. He is currently writing a general history of the Holy Roman Empire for Penguin and Harvard University Press. Phil Withington  is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. He has published extensively on urban citizenship and popular politics during the early modern era. His current research includes a project on intoxicants and early modernity and a book about the social history of the Renaissance. Steven N. Zwicker  is Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Washington University, St Louis. He has written widely on seventeenth-century politics and literature including Dryden’s Political Poetry (1972), Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry (2014), Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649– 1689 (1996), and, with Derek Hirst, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (2012); in addition he has edited Dryden’s poetry for Penguin Books, and several volumes of interdisciplinary essays with Kevin Sharpe.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the contributors for their work on this book. For much of the time it was taking shape I was a Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Sheffield. Without the help of Suzanne Hubbard and Gary Rivett I would have found it impossible to make progress with it and I am very grateful to them both. I would also like to thank my Vice Chancellor, Sir Keith Burnett, for his wholehearted support of my scholarly work while I was in that post. In the latter stages I benefited greatly from the advice of Karen Harvey, Simon Middleton, and Jason Peacey. I am also deeply grateful to Cora and Melissa who showed their customary level of interest, which was very refreshing.

Pa rt I

I N T RODU C T ION

Chapter 1

Civil War and Revolu t i on in Engl and, S c ot l a nd, and Irel a nd Michael J. Braddick

Since the 1970s there has been a sustained reaction against progressive accounts of the English Revolution that were broadly characterized by ‘revisionist’ historians as Marxist or Whig. They were said to be both teleological (assuming an inevitable direction to events) and anachronistic (describing ideas, attitudes, and social and political groups in our terms rather than those appropriate to the period). Those that located the causes of events in underlying structural changes were also said to be deterministic (paying little or no attention to individual subjectivities, self-understanding, choices, or agency).1 These historiographical concerns were shared much more widely, of course, and in other fields were important in stimulating new departures such as the new cultural history or the history of marginal and excluded social groups. In the historiography of early modern England this tended to reinforce a separation of political and other kinds of history. While political histories concentrated more closely on narrative, the new social history began to look elsewhere for the political lives of the humble and poor, and the struggles that gave meaning to their lives: early modern social and cultural history has flourished but largely independently of the historiography of the Revolution with which influential historians had once tried to link it.2 The methodological critique of progressive histories also led to sharp criticism of many of their key conclusions. The English Revolution was for a time routinely presented as a paradigm case of the transition to modernity, and a phenomenon around which social, political, intellectual, and cultural histories could be focused. As specialists began to dismantle this view so the study of the Revolution seemed to take an inward turn: the conclusions being proposed were more often seen as particular to this sub-field rather than crucial for understanding the broader sweep of human history. At the same time, as historical writing diversified, the Revolution ceased to be such an important focus for teaching and writing about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England more broadly.

4   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland Indeed, work on early modern England that has been influential in other fields in recent years has often paid little or no attention to the Revolution. Each of the leading revisionists is in fact associated with arguments about long-term or comparative significance: Mark Kishlansky with the rise of partisan and majoritarian politics; John Morrill with the revolt of the provinces, Wars of Religion, and the British problem; Conrad Russell with the functional breakdown of the English state and the crisis of the multiple kingdoms.3 But these have been much less influential than the analysis of the ‘first modern society’ had been.4 Much of this has been implicitly accepted in the field and in particular the critics of revisionism tended to concentrate their fire on revisionists’ conclusions rather than on their methodological critique of progressive writing. Post-revisionists have certainly been critical of revisionism’s methodological claims (sometimes sharply so), but it has not been in defence of the methods of progressive histories.5 Revisionism is now being historicized, however, and much of the heat has gone out of these debates. This volume takes the opportunity to reflect on some of the deeper issues at stake in these arguments, and in the interpretation of the Revolution—in particular how its historians now see the relationship between structures and events, how they approach the rich intellectual and cultural products of the period, and how they address its comparative and long-term significance. One key legacy of the close attention to the political dynamics of the crisis has been an acceptance that exclusive concentration on England is unsustainable.6 As a result, the title of this book is more problematic than it would once have been. However, related terms such as the War(s) of the Three Kingdoms have little currency outside academic circles and in any case do not cover some of the most interesting aspects of the period for many readers: revolutionary radicalism in England for example, which is largely a post-war and more narrowly English phenomenon. This terminological confusion reflects a more fundamental fact: although the crisis was shared, and the fates of the Three Kingdoms were obviously and crucially intertwined, the experience and significance of that crisis were very different in each national context. The starting point for this book is, therefore, the most familiar perspective—that of the English Revolution—but the chapters here explore how those events grew out of, and resonated in, the politics of each of the Three Kingdoms, and in their interactions. To that extent it is as much an exercise in comparative history as an account of a shared history, and the treatment here often serves to sharpen our sense of the differing significance of events and outcomes in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Events The recent attention to the dynamics of politics stands in marked contrast to older structural accounts of the Revolution. Stone’s classic work, for example, ended the analysis of the ‘causes of the English Revolution’ in 1642, but more recent work has emphasized how far there was to travel from the battle of Edgehill to the execution of the king.7 As these

Michael j. Braddick   5 chapters show, however, the return to narrative has not come entirely at the expense of attempts to understand structures and transformations in them, and does not imply that there is nothing to study beyond events and contingency. Some of the most important work on the period before the civil war now emphasizes the frameworks, intellectual and practical, in which events unfolded. Peter Lake’s chapter discusses some of the key features of political culture and practice on which ‘events’ impacted. Since the 1530s, politicians in England had been tempted to take religious and political issues outside the institutions of government in order to influence decisions within them. Political rumour, circulating manuscripts, and, increasingly, pamphlets, helped create, cumulatively, a public for national politics, but one that was not easily controlled: a post-Reformation public sphere. It resulted from practical decisions and tactical manoeuvres, but constituted an ongoing framework for future political action. Control was quickly lost in the multiple crises of the late 1630s and a chaotic public debate broke out. This was in itself a breach of accepted norms, making negotiation more difficult, and bringing an end to this public polemic became for some people a political end in itself.8 Alan Cromartie has analysed the development of political thought between 1480 and 1642 in a similar way: not seeking origins for the party positions in 1642 so much as reconstructing the frames of reference and traditions of interpretation on which events impacted.9 These features of political life do not explain why war broke out, but we cannot understand the crisis without understanding them. Julian Goodare’s point of departure is the fluidity of politics in the Covenanting crisis: how did a series of events initially seen as a fairly limited problem of law and order become a revolution? His answer is partly to do with the capacity for self-organization in Scottish society, particularly in religious affairs. But there is also a significant role for contingency—the slow response of the Scottish privy council and its own divisions over the new Prayer Book, and the effects of the decisions Charles himself took, and failed to take. A more pragmatic man might have withdrawn the Book and disgraced a key adviser in order to buy off opposition, but Charles stuck to his guns. It was this inflexibility which, in Goodare’s view, prompted the creation of the National Covenant. English government, in dealing with this crisis, depended on a high degree of voluntary local participation which could not be taken for granted.10 England in 1637 was at peace, although it was not free of political tensions. These tensions coalesced into powerful opposition, argues Richard Cust, as a result of contingent, external events—first in Scotland and then in Ireland. English military failure, and the political failure of the Short Parliament, allowed a ‘junto’ led by disaffected peers to mobilize support for a settlement very different from that intended by Charles, and this struggle was at the heart of English politics. In the aftermath of the Irish rising, Charles made a series of ‘grotesque miscalculations’ prompting a backlash that drove him from his capital. This made civil war likely, and was a devastating blow to his prospects in fighting it. How things turned out, then, was the product of chance and external events—the rising in Ireland, Charles’s political judgements, and how his opponents chose to see them—but these events were framed by ideas, institutions, and practices whose distinctiveness we can trace back before the war.

6   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland The Irish rising now assumes a central importance in explaining the collapse of royal authority in England. Joseph Cope shows that how it was reported, and how Charles seemed to respond, confirmed fears about the political and religious future in Scotland and England. But the rising was also, in part, prompted by events in England and Scotland: Wentworth’s enemies in Ireland were given an opportunity by attacks on him in England. The English reaction to the Irish rising—horrified, credulous, and hostile anti-popery—helped foster unity among Irish Catholics previously divided by other cultural distinctions. As in England and Scotland, the impact of events elsewhere was very significant, but so too was local chance—for example, the disastrous political consequences of forging a royal commission from Charles as a legitimation for the rising. And how events unfolded depended very much on immediate local conditions—reflecting histories of local grievance and neighbourly conflict.11 Under the pressure of events, actions were taken which gave rise to new arguments, practices, institutions, and relationships: actions taken for a particular purpose established practices and precepts which in turn shaped future action. For example, as Goodare shows, the Covenanting crisis led to the articulation of a remarkable national document, the focus for a ‘constitutionalist, anti-absolutist movement’. Laura Stewart is equally alert to the rapidly shifting ground of politics but also emphasizes the lasting significance of the measures and arguments used to make sense of the crisis: for example, fiscal-military reform or the new force given to the idea of a covenanted society, which broadened the range of people managing Scotland’s political fate. My own chapter explores how partisans in England mobilized men, resources, and political support, in a process of armed negotiation. As their political demands escalated, and as the scale and destructiveness of the war increased, differences emerged about war aims and what would constitute a just peace. Building and sustaining support in these conditions prompted new forms of political argument, new sources of disagreement, and new alliances. The interaction of military and political mobilization was therefore central to political innovation and to the development of the political debate. Exploring mobilization combines sensitivity to the fluidity of politics with exploration of the origins of political innovation. In a similar way, Micheál Ó Siochrú shows how twelve years of war in Ireland, in which 25% of the population died in multi-faceted military conflicts of bewildering complexity, gave rise to a sustained exercise in Catholic self-government. As Ireland was torn asunder by internal conflicts and foreign intervention, the Confederacy sought out an inclusive and constructive definition of Irishness, on which to re-establish a stable social and political order. While it was undercut by political divisions which were exacerbated by reactions to a constantly and rapidly shifting political scene, this was an experiment of some durability and of much greater historical importance: a significant product of political calculations made in a messy, complex, and shifting crisis. These essays also show that the conflict grew out of and ramified in the politics of each of the Three Kingdoms in distinctive ways. As a result, when Charles was defeated in England in 1646, the settlement reached with him there was not simply of local significance, but would fundamentally shape Irish and Scottish politics. As Philip Baker shows, political debate in England during the 1640s created the possibility of discussion

Michael j. Braddick   7 of regicide, but there is very little evidence of a concerted attempt by a group of any substance to achieve that. He has reservations about the strongest statements that the regicide was largely contingent but he finds little evidence of a settled desire to bring about Charles’s death. As a result of these hesitations, guesses about what foreign powers might intend became significant: for example that there might be an Irish invasion. For Baker the regicide manifested the failure of peace-making in all Three Kingdoms rather than a long-planned constitutional revolution or conscious act of state-building. For the latter we might look at developments taking place across the previous decade.12 Although the events of the 1640s had independent significance in each of the Three Kingdoms, they also tied their fates together. Charles I’s son, the future Charles II, was proclaimed in Scotland not just as King of Scotland but also of Great Britain and Ireland, and as long as Ireland was under Catholic control it would remain a base for royalism. Whatever higher aspirations English parliamentary leaders may have had for Scotland and Ireland after the regicide, the pressing need for military security dominated their actions. The end result was conquest and subordination. Derek Hirst finds few positive achievements to commend in these English interventions, secondary as they always were to the imperative need to establish military control. Hopes for legal and social reform in Scotland were not realized and the authority of kirk and nobility was gradually reasserted, while in Ireland, despite the massive spoils available to the conquerors through confiscations, it was the pre-existing Protestant interest that won out. Military imperatives also underlay fundamental tensions in England. As David Smith shows, the 1650s were punctuated by military interventions—in 1648/9 of course, but also in 1653, 1654, and in the period of direct military rule between 1655 and 1657. Oliver Cromwell was crucial to holding the regime together, as the events following his death seem to demonstrate. Army officers once more at odds with civilian politicians played a crucial role in the Restoration. That, as Tim Harris shows, was a Britannic event. The end of the Protectoral regime grew out of a military intervention coordinated in Ireland, Scotland, and England. It too was unpredictable, and it is not at all clear at what point the restoration of the monarchy became the clear purpose of Monck’s intervention. Although it was widely welcomed, the Restoration was never universally popular and, just as importantly, it was embraced by different groups for different reasons. The settlements in each of the Three Kingdoms were unsatisfactory in different ways—the Restoration had not been born of consensus, and the settlement did not establish consensus. The complex interconnections of politics in the Three Kingdoms continued to drive political instability throughout the later seventeenth century.13

Institutions and Actors The second part of the book explores more explicitly some of the structures of political life which shaped and were shaped by the crisis, as well as the interconnections between the Three Kingdoms and their comparative histories.

8   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland The fates of the Three Kingdoms were connected by the careers of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. As we have seen, Charles I’s political judgements and preferences, and even his personality, are identified by many historians as crucial to an understanding of how events played out. His handling of the Prayer Book rebellion in Scotland, or of his parliamentary critics in England in late 1641 and early 1642, his conduct of peace negotiations after 1646 or at his trial—these all seem to be crucial moments at which events might have taken a different course had Charles behaved differently. In fact Charles has often been blamed not just for the way events played out, but also for provoking conflict in the first place by refusing to let sleeping dogs lie, or by the stubborn pursuit of unrealizable or insensitive policies, often in a high-handed way. More recently, Kevin Sharpe and Mark Kishlansky have mounted vigorous defences of the coherence of Charles’s views and of his political tactics, while pointing up the unreasonableness of his opponents. The debate continues,14 but it is clear that exploring how Charles approached politics in each of his kingdoms is another way of understanding their connected but divergent experiences: to the Irish he was the best defence against the often hysterical anti-popery of the English parliament; in Scotland the best hope for the Presbyterian settlement; and in England the bulwark of the balanced constitution and episcopal authority. How he appeared to his supporters reveals the divergent issues that were at stake in each of his kingdoms, and the complexity of his task in trying to govern them as a single inheritance. Cromwell’s memory is perhaps more contested than that of any other British political figure—sometimes celebrated for his contribution to the rise of parliament and, later, democracy; decried by others for the suppression of more radical figures; and almost unanimously condemned for his conduct in Ireland. We know surprisingly little about him at crucial points in his life, and there are wide divergences of opinion as to how to interpret his apparent indecision at crisis points: was he a calculating hypocrite who said what needed to be said in order to achieve power, or a religious bigot whose mask regularly slipped?15 Colin Davis suggests we see him instead as engaged in perpetual negotiation, seeking continually to build alliances and coalitions. That was made more difficult by the complex interactions between events and opinions in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Davis offers a view of a man with core principles—‘red lines’ which could not be crossed—but whose normal mode was a kind of patient coalition-building suited to the political culture of early modern English government.16 He had fewer potential allies in Scotland and virtually none in Ireland, with the result that negotiation yielded far less. David Smith reveals connections between the development of representative institutions in the Three Kingdoms, but also points up their differing trajectories. They took on more routine responsibility everywhere, achieving in the process greater independence from royal command as well as creating more elaborate committee structures. There was borrowing in both areas—the Long Parliament’s Triennial Act and committee structures, for example, owed something to Covenanting practice. The Confederate’s General Assembly was a much more novel experiment—it was necessarily a far more powerful organ of government than the Irish parliament had been, despite its continued loyalty to the crown. These developments were the fruits of the 1640s however, and

Michael j. Braddick   9 mostly fell victim to the military needs of the republican regime in England, eventually being replaced by institutions representing Britain as a whole. With the Restoration came a return of an English parliament with the clock set back to 1641 and a Scottish parliament set at 1633. In Ireland the restored parliament was an instrument of the broader settlement, securing the Protestant interest and English authority. The development of these institutions reveals a shared experience, and indeed a connected history, but also a comparative history. Andrew Hopper offers a similar analysis of the armies. Within a shared crisis they acted differently as vehicles of political education and engagement, prompting different forms of institutional innovation (state formation) and playing different political roles. Aristocratic networks—‘knots’ of aristocrats, as John Morrill terms them—also connected events in the Three Kingdoms.17 The history of the English crisis was for a time written with the nobility largely left out, and even as a manifestation of a crisis in their authority.18 This no longer seems to bear scrutiny. John Adamson has argued that leading aristocrats made much of the political running, even (contrary to common expectation) on the parliamentary side. While there has been criticism of how far he has pushed the argument, it is clear that the English aristocracy were crucial players in the crisis.19 And as John Miller makes clear, noble power remained an important feature of English political life after the Restoration.20 Recent work has demonstrated how the nobilities of Scotland and Ireland also adjusted to, and weathered, political change, and in those Kingdoms too, the aristocracy were crucial in shaping how the crises unfolded.21 The persistence of noble power has been emphasized as part of a broader critique of attempts to link political conflict directly to the effects of changes in social structure. A sophisticated debate about popular political allegiance has built on the tradition of making the connection in this way, but even in a much-refined form it remains very controversial.22 The social history of politics has more recently been written around the history of political communication, and forms of communal and popular politics. In these areas many historians now see evidence in England of broader and more intensive political engagement in and as a consequence of the Revolution. Jason Peacey explores the role of print in that context. The collapse of pre-publication licensing was associated with a massive qualitative change in what was printed in England—new kinds of authors, often producing cheap titles reporting and commenting on the news. This intensified public debate and encouraged active, regular, and detailed participation among a reading public. It increased the transparency of politics, and encouraged comment on particular individuals, rather than more general processes or issues, in languages that could be appropriated. It proved a mixed blessing for governments, and its importance is reflected in the attempts of successive regimes to re-establish control. Peacey is tempted to refer to this as a public sphere.23 We cannot tell very accurately who was able to enter this new realm, or on what terms. There is general evidence about price, distribution, and the size of print runs, but it is very difficult to know how widely and where any particular publication circulated. But print is not the only evidence we have of deepening political engagement in the English crisis. Stephen Roberts argues that the greatly increased burden of the

10   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland state—particularly the financial burden—was associated with a regularization of local government. There is no scholarly consensus about whether participation in local government was more broadened socially than narrowed politically in these years. There is evidence that the net was cast wide for committee membership, but also that active membership was a rather different thing, and that it was inflected by a partisan insistence on ‘honesty’. This in itself, of course, reflects the deeper penetration of national politics into local life. Attempts to make these committees accountable and the use of juries helped establish a representative element in local government. Despite examples of breaches of due process and the use of martial law, we can discern a general process of greater integration of institutions, and political languages, between national politics and local life. The growth of partisan political communication and accelerating political engagement are also important themes of recent work. Crucial in that sense were England’s urban citizens. Phil Withington shows how, over the previous three generations, the ‘urban system’ developed considerably: a much larger number of corporations, integrated more closely into national life by a quickening commercial economy, active in Reformation politics and self-activating in local government informed by ideals of Renaissance humanism. Urban citizens elected the majority of MPs (who were of course at the heart of the crisis) and often played a crucial role in the outbreak of the war—mobilizing partisan support, and delivering control of key strong points or military stores. The institutions and values of the urban citizenry created a ‘field of conflict’ in which political differences were fought out, and an arena in which decisive actions could be taken. The urban system was crucial in framing the crisis, and its citizens were often key actors in the unfolding drama, while the language of citizenship was also important in framing political argument. Attempts after the Restoration to control corporations reflect the significance attached to them by seventeenth-century governments.24 The crisis in England impinged on a society in which groups below the gentry were active in the routines of government, and in which there was considerable shared ground between the political languages of elite and commoner. John Walter shows how crowd actions might jog or influence authorities, while sixteenth-century rebellions demonstrated a considerable capacity for active engagement in politics. More routinely, libels and gossip were potentially powerful ways of embarrassing and restraining governors. In the early 1640s crowds pursued agrarian grievances, and continued to do so, but as the crisis unfolded other kinds of partisan politics emerged—the use of committees against social superiors on political grounds, or direct actions intended to foster religious reformation and street politics, particularly in London. Petitioning and national oath-taking engaged large constituencies with the detail of national politics. Taken together, the Revolution created a new space for popular politics, which became more divided and partisan, and this was to persist.25 Ann Hughes shows how gendered conceptions of social order shaped perceptions of the crisis, but also how they were challenged by it. Disorder was diagnosed and decried in gendered terms, and the languages of insult and threat were profoundly shaped

Michael j. Braddick   11 by such fundamental assumptions about how the world ought to work. At the same time, women had new opportunities to act in military and political roles, albeit justified in relation to their conventional household roles and responsibilities. As Levellers or as prophets, for example, women made directly ideological claims. It is also clear that much polemic, self-presentation, and critique centred on notions of manhood. This was not a revolution in gender roles—no one argued for formal political rights for women and it is difficult to point to long-term changes in such a complex set of relationships—but this approach demonstrates how allegiance was profoundly influenced by ‘matters of interest, imagination, and emotion’.26 Equipped with a sensitivity to how the experience was shaped and mediated by social structures, beliefs, and practices, we understand the crisis better; but we can also see early modern English society through its revolution. It is difficult to reproduce this kind of thematic analysis for Ireland and Scotland, partly for archival reasons but mainly because the secondary literature is simply not as abundant. But Scott Spurlock shows how the Covenanting revolution deepened the engagement of a broad public with national politics, in ways that persisted after the Restoration. The experience of the Covenant may also have been important for the consciousness of individual Scots, encouraging them to be more active, but also more self-critical, political subjects. The proliferation of committees transformed local government, and during the 1650s more regular local courts led to a fuller engagement with the institutions of government. As Smith also notes, there was a significant legacy in greater parliamentary independence, something like a legislative revolution.27 Scottish politics were becoming more institutionalized through the national government—manifest in the further decline of the feud, for example. While the Covenanters were defeated, and there was no permanent change in the composition of the Scottish elite, therefore, this period did mark a break in Scottish history. And of course, the defeat of the Covenanting movement had profound importance for Scottish religious life. The Confederates in Ireland suffered a catastrophic military defeat that was also a total defeat for their religious and political ideals. As a consequence, this period has often been treated as decisive for Ireland’s future, with Cromwell as its architect: the contrast with English perceptions of Cromwell has often been very sharp. As Cope shows, the memory of this period in Ireland was dominated by an arc of Protestant celebration, with no very powerful counter-narrative, and Ó Siochrú’s work has in one sense sought to remedy the defect by emphasizing the significance of this experiment in Catholic self-government.28 Toby Barnard takes a more moderate view of Cromwell, both as a military commander and as a driving force behind the settlement. In the latter context, in fact, Cromwell followed rather than led an established English view of Ireland. In other ways too, the measures of the 1640s and 1650s accelerated developments that were longer in the making, and took longer to complete, than a concentration on the formal measures taken would suggest, but the positive achievements were few. It was a ‘formative decade. . . .What was guaranteed by the grim events of 1649–53 was that Ireland did not break free of English control, at least not for more than two centuries.’29 It was formative for what it ruled out, rather than for what it created.

12   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland

Parties, Ideas, and People Dynamic politics also gave rise to remarkable intellectual and artistic creativity. One of the key claims of revisionism was that progressive histories distorted or ignored the views of the majority of people—royalists, neutrals, and conservatives were given far less attention than ‘radicals’, a category that was in itself highly anachronistic, while the conflation of ‘radical’ and ‘popular’ distorted the aspirations and experience of the broader population. More recent work has taken a much broader view of the creativity of revolutionary thinking, and has tended to see it as emerging in dialogue with events, rather than narrating the course of events as a battle between radicals and their opponents. For Alan Cromartie royalism was a product of the crisis not one of its causes, taking shape in defence of threatened institutions and values, and then persisting. It was not a coherent position or programme before the war—in fact it centred on the political settlement reached in 1641, which Charles I himself found fairly repugnant. As it took shape, though, it laid claim to terms that secured its longevity—honour, civility, learning, and, in some eyes, liberty. Royalists did not defend Charles I so much as the constitutional role of the monarch, and in so doing exposed tensions in an opposition view that was also essentially monarchist. Royalists also defended religious order and decency, drawing on stereotypes of puritanism of very long standing, and so managed to present their aggressive episcopalianism as a moderate alternative. The cultural representation of royalism embodied defence of conventional values of all kinds, and in the absence of a social revolution the hold of these values among elite groups allowed this emergent royalism to weather the upheavals. It had crystallized out of the fluid politics of the period, though, and became something of an embarrassment to the restored monarch, who like his father would have liked to have stood for other things. Rachel Foxley shows that parliamentarianism was also an evolving commitment, as people arrived at support for parliament by a variety of routes and at different times. Motivated by differing religious, political, or more immediate concerns, they were united in an immediate aim and at a particular point, rather than by an ideological platform, like the Scottish National Covenant. Their cause rested on a retrospective account of the failings of Charles I’s government rather than a unified view of what the future should hold, and because their retrospective accounts differed, so too did their suggested remedies. There was further fragmentation as the crisis unfolded, giving rise to fluid alliances and conditional individual loyalties. One consequence of this fluidity and lack of clarity was radicalization, although we need to recognize that people were pushed in new directions by different forces and for different reasons, so that there was no unitary radicalism either. From all this emerged some distinctive new positions, however—notably a parliamentary absolutism regarded with some hostility by a more popular radicalism. This was also a crucial period in the development of formally articulated political theory: indeed to J. G. A. Pocock these were the ‘epic years’ in the history of English political thought30 and behind the pressure of immediate choices and the rough and tumble

Michael j. Braddick   13 of partisan politics lay more profound debates. For Ted Vallance much of this can be read as an argument about how to secure liberty. He shows how differing conceptions of liberty lay behind the radically different responses to the policies of Charles I’s personal rule, between for example Hobbes and Filmer on one hand, and Scott and Parker on the other. The same issue later informed the position of radical critics of the parliamentary position too, notably the Levellers, and framed the way the hopes (and failings) of successive regimes were discussed during the 1650s. It was these issues, rather than more strictly constitutional questions, which underlay the deepest divisions. In a similar way, John Coffey detects a series of conceptual developments of great significance for the future of Protestantism. The reaction against Laudianism fostered an attempt to define Calvinist orthodoxy in the Westminster Assembly. This attempt failed, and in fact helped to unleash a chaotic religious debate in which, for example, aspects of Laudianism were assimilated to radical critiques of Calvinism. The legacy was more positive than the ‘failure’ of Calvinist orthodoxy, however. These debates were crucial for the future of Protestantism and the Westminster Confession, for example, is an ‘official statement of faith’ for millions of Presbyterians. Similarly, the impulse to explore the natural world, the better to understand creation, gave rise to insights of lasting significance. The appeal to broader publics was an essential feature of politics; it was done in overlapping and contested terms, for quite different purposes; and that prompted innovative forms of political argument, and new ways of understanding. Laid bare by the crisis, views on some fundamental issues were articulated with great clarity and originality. The resultant creativity produced not just radicalism as conventionally defined but innovative royalism, as well as the remarkable but alien millenarianism of the Hartlib circle, or the enterprising use of astrology.31 Creativity in that sense has also been an important theme of recent scholarship on literature and the arts. Steven Zwicker evokes the creative profusion of the literary production of these decades—of authors and genres, and experiment—and shows how individuals moved across this terrain in unpredictable ways. Literary work was deeply marked by the polemical environment: a lush and fertile world in which many writers moved with great freedom, and out of it came some masterpieces. For Zwicker the genius of this work, epitomized in some ways by Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’, lies in its handling of ambivalence, ambiguity, and uncertainty. The fluidity and dynamism emphasized in recent historical treatments of political life helps to contextualize some of the period’s most enduring literary works and to impose taxonomies or to categorize too closely is to distort this rich literary field. There were creative developments in the visual arts and architecture too. Timothy Wilks shows that a once-conventional emphasis on puritan iconophobia is inadequate. Some of the parliamentary aristocrats were serious patrons—Essex, Warwick, Northumberland, and Pembroke—and even in wartime Oxford some promising artists such as Dobson could make their way for a while with royalist patronage. Much devotional art was destroyed, of course, and there was an exodus of talented artists, but there was also movement in the other direction—notably of Peter Lely and Wenceslas Hollar—and the regimes of the 1650s were serious about the projection

14   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland of a public image. Similar arguments hold for architecture. The war brought an end to the building boom of the 1630s but building resumed after 1646. Town rebuilding along planned lines and a less ornamented classicism were features of the period that (to a contested extent), were consistent with the longer-term development of seventeenth-century architectural taste. A  key feature of artistic patronage in this period, however, was how surprising were the aesthetic tastes of some prominent politicians—Lambert, for example. There was sectarian hostility to the image, and to ostentation more generally perhaps, but it is difficult to read off aesthetic tastes from political positions, and certainly mistaken to assume that artistic creativity was crushed by militant parliamentarianism.

Wider Perspectives The crisis gave rise to changed patterns of political engagement, state formation, and religious and political thought, transformations that were prompted in differing ways and with different consequences in each of the Three Kingdoms. Clearly, emphasis on the dynamism of politics does not rule out attention to long-term changes in the institutional and intellectual frameworks through which political life was articulated. Progressive histories had presented the Revolution as a key moment in the resolution of structural social tensions arising from fundamental economic change, and crucial to England’s path to modernity. That connection has been a casualty of revisionism, and perhaps also of the separate path taken by economic and social history since the 1970s: social structural and economic change is now generally accepted to have moved to a separate rhythm. The effects of war and military mobilization, rather than the aspirations of the Revolution, now carry more weight in explaining the course of social and economic change. Following this trend, John Miller downplays the effects on the relative power of different social groups in England and although there were economic changes in this period that were of long-term, and indeed global, significance, their relationship to the political crisis is unclear. English naval growth and the navigation system, which bound an increasingly large part of the global trade into an English network, had clear political origins, and there was a rapid growth in the financial sector too, which clearly intertwined with institutional changes arising from the crisis. The underlying demographic trends shifted too—population growth levelled off, and rising middle incomes supported a consumer boom. Although the threat of famine receded, poverty persisted, stimulating the institutionalization of the Poor Law, which was to persist into the nineteenth century and represented a significant regularization of local government activity. But these changes are not easy to relate to the mid-century crisis and it is clear that many of them worked out independently of the political crisis. There was, though, a marked growth of religious diversity and political partisanship, institutionalized in cities and towns, and dividing the ruling elite: here the Revolution crisis had enduring effects on social relations.32

Michael j. Braddick   15 There was a literary and artistic legacy33 but Laura Knoppers’s subject is the legacy of these events as a subject of literary and artistic work, focusing on the nineteenth century, when debate about the legacy of the seventeenth-century revolutions was prominent, and affected by the long shadow of the French Revolution. She shows how Delaroche’s famous painting of Cromwell and Charles I (1831) and Victor Hugo’s play Cromwell (1827) offered an ‘open-ended representation that calls for an active reader’. Walter Scott’s earlier novel, Woodstock (1824), had also invited such an engagement with the issues, in a way that echoes in some ways Zwicker’s view of literary and artistic responses at the time of the crisis. These works manifest a more general legacy in our cultural life: the representation not ‘of any particular political message, but almost the opposite: a kind of open-endedness and need for interpretation’.34 Developments in this period retain their place in accounts of state formation. The British state that emerged over the following 80  years was, Mark Knights argues, deeply marked by a revolutionary process that extended well into the eighteenth century. Changes in political practices and institutions, and in ways of thinking about these things, transformed the state, political culture, and political discourse. A state emerged with radically transformed fiscal-military capacity, a plural religious culture, and a steadily expanding territorial reach; but there was also a counter-pressure from a country Whig position committed to resistance to executive tyranny and court corruption. Partisanship was institutionalized in frequent elections, an increasingly vibrant public sphere, and transformed practices of petitioning. We can also identify a distinctively post-civil war discourse—a revolutionary emphasis on popular sovereignty and the right to resist tyrants and religious toleration was opposed by a counter-discourse dedicated to the defence of the monarchy and the church. The memory of the civil war remained important in animating these debates long after 1660. The emergent British state was also deeply marked by the patterns of interaction between the Three Kingdoms consolidated during the crisis. In John Morrill’s analysis the English parliament did not look beyond England, even when executing Charles I, whereas the Scots were acutely aware that the best hope of securing their aims was in concert with an English settlement. Irish aspirations to establish Catholicism ran directly counter to a settled English view that popery must be extirpated not just in England but also in Ireland. This cemented the political subordination of the Irish kingdom. How particular English localities experienced the war was clearly inflected by their proximity to the other kingdoms but English perceptions of the war were narrower than in Scotland and Ireland. These asymmetries were also manifest in patterns of marriage and landholding among the interconnected aristocracies of the Three Kingdoms. Each of the Three Kingdoms had a civil war, but there were also wars between them. After 1649 even the English parliamentary leaders saw that, but incorporation had failed and the search would continue ‘for a stable state system that would never be fully a British state, with one law, one church, and one sense of nationhood’.35 This was a crucial period too, as Knights and others note, for the development of the British empire and for the Atlantic world. The Revolution was closely associated with the increasing fiscal and military power of the English state, the quickening of overseas

16   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland trade and the increasing will and capacity to regulate it through the navigation system.36 Colonies of overseas settlement took root at an accelerating rate after mid-century, and from the 1660s English merchants could handle and protect a slave trade that was of fundamental importance for the future of the Atlantic. Links around the Atlantic were also forged, and colonies and merchants came to a new understanding of their relationship with the crown. While there is no doubt that the Revolution was important for the future of the Atlantic,37 it is less clear that the developing Atlantic world was important to the origins or course of the Revolution. Robert Brenner has traced the relationship between particular merchant interests and particular political programmes and others have shown links between opponents of Charles I and Atlantic ventures, without in the latter case suggesting that it is their Atlantic interests which determined their political views.38 New England polemicists such as Roger Williams and returning exiles such as Hugh Peter played an important role in the radicalization of English politics, but it seems easier to say that their radicalism had led to their exile rather than that the very nascent Atlantic world was exerting a significant pull on English politics. This was to change rapidly after 1650, however, and by the 1690s it is clear that Atlantic and Imperial interests had developed a fundamental importance for English politics (and for the relationships between the Three Kingdoms).39 The connection with wider European politics by contrast has been a very neglected theme in recent writing, although there are clear connections between the course of events in England and, for example, in Germany.40 The Solemn League and Covenant envisaged the possibility that other Protestant powers might join and as Hirst points out, the English republic had military concerns that were European-wide—it was the hostility of the French, Spanish, and Dutch as much as of the Scottish and Irish that fed them. Peter Wilson does not seek to offer a general, comparative, explanation for conflict in this period, nor a consideration of the interconnectedness of the British and Imperial conflicts. Instead he outlines key interpretative issues in the Imperial context that might inform thinking about other European conflicts. The empire had a civil war, in which foreign powers intervened for discrete purposes, with defined interests, separated from their other conflicts, and directed at securing the Imperial settlement most helpful to their own interests. For Wilson the German crisis was one of a number of regional conflicts rather than part of a general European crisis, but this does not rule out the possibility of fruitful comparison and contrast. This return to a broader canvas, and the significance of these events in a comparative and more transhistorical context, is re-emerging as an historiographical possibility.41

Conclusions No single significance can be attributed to these events on the basis of this rich and diverse historical literature: instead, like Delaroche, it invites an active reader to make up their own mind, and to explore in it the issues that concern them. This does not imply

Michael j. Braddick   17 a refusal to draw any meaning from these events but rather a refusal to impose a single cause or meaning on complex and diverse experiences. This historiography provides the material and opportunity to reflect on many issues of political salience—for example, the importance of gender for understanding politics, the relationship between religious toleration and social order, the relationship between political instability and intellectual creativity, the emergence of the institutions of the British state and its empire, and many others. The field has not abandoned the attempt to find meaning in these events but has opened up to a more diverse range of questions. It is also clear that an emphasis on fluidity and dynamism has not ruled out attention to what shaped and framed the crisis, and how the crisis transformed political and social life in the longer term. The actions of individuals or groups reproduce the structures and practices of political life, but also create and shape them for the future. Ideas have recently been given more prominence than material interests in explaining the course of events, but they are seen as developing in dialogue with events, not simply driving them: there is no simple retreat from materialism to idealism. There is a developing connection with a broader social history around the history of political communication and engagement, and the cultural history of mentalités, rather than of social structural change and economic transformation. These events have significance in understanding political development in each of the Three Kingdoms, and their relationships with one another, as well as of their religious, intellectual, literary, and artistic lives, and this comparative history is increasingly open to wider comparison too. Rather than a lurch from one pole to another—from interests to ideas or from structures to contingency—the centre of gravity now seems to reside in the relationships between these things. There is much more to be done, of course, and in particular the potential of the Revolution to illuminate the social and cultural life of early modern society has barely been tapped. But with the heated debate prompted by revisionism now largely burned out, the time is ripe for a more concerted discussion of these core issues.

Notes 1. Glenn Burgess, ‘On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33.3 (1990): 609–27. 2. See, for example, the foundational texts by Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost—Further Explored, 3rd edition (London, 1983), esp. chap. 8; and Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982). 3. Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection:  Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986); John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution:  Essays by John Morrill (London, 1993), Morrill, ‘The British Problem, c.1534–1707’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British Problem c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke, 1996), 1–38; Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990). 4. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James A. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989). These essays, of course, deal with much more than the English Revolution.

18   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland 5. For more on revisionism and its critics see the further reading at the end of this chapter. 6. Russell, Causes; Morrill, ‘British Problem’. 7. Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (London, 1972). 8. The ‘explosion of print’ in the early 1640s was not an insular English phenomenon. It had Scottish origins and grew out of European connections: Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), chap. 5. 9. Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution:  An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, 2006). 10. See also Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), chap. 2. 11. See, for comparison, John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999). 12. See chapters by Smith and Roberts. 13. See Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2006); and Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2007). 14. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (London, 1992); Mark Kishlansky, ‘Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, P&P, 189 (2005): 41–80, and the ensuing debate with Clive Holmes, Julian Goodare, and Richard Cust, P&P, 205 (2009): 175–237. See also Mark Kishlansky, Charles I: An Abbreviated Life (London, 2014). 15. Hirst also notes his strategic indecision as a military commander, p. 181. 16. For a similar view of Charles I see Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, 2005). 17. p. 565. 18. Stone, Causes, 72–6. 19. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007); Richard Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625–1641 (Cambridge, 2013). 20. Miller; for the revisionist implications of the persistence of the Old Regime see Jonathan Clark, English Society, 1660–1832, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2000). 21. Adamson, Noble Revolt; Cust, Charles I  and the Aristocracy; Keith Brown, Noble Power in Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution (Edinburgh, 2013); Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2012). 22. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion:  Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985); Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon During the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994). See the debate between Underdown and Morrill in Journal of British Studies, 26 (1987): 451–79. 23. For the influence of Habermas see Peter Lake and Steven C. A. Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). 24. Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic:  Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998); John Miller, Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660–1722 (Oxford, 2007). 25. On this theme see also Tom Leng, ‘ “Citizens at the door”: Mobilising against the Enemy in Civil War London’, Journal of Historical Sociology (forthcoming 2015). For examples of partisan engagement see David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010). 26. p. 360. 27. p. 248–9.

Michael j. Braddick   19 28. See the chapters in this volume by Cope and Ó Siochrú. 29. p. 390. 30. J. C. Davis, ‘ “Epic Years”: The English Revolution and J. G. A. Pocock’s Approach to the History of Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, 29.3 (2008): 519–42. 31. For the term creativity as preferable to radicalism see Mike Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England During the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), 175–94. 32. For further thoughts on this theme see Michael J. Braddick, ‘Loyauté Partisane Durant la Guerre Civile et Histoire des Relations Sociales en Angleterre’, in Laurent Bourquin, Philippe Hamon, Pierre Karila-Cohen, and Cédric Michon (eds.), Conflits, Opinion(s) et Politicization de la Fin du Moyen Âge au Début du xxe Siècle (Rennes, 2011), 95–114. 33. Explored in detail in Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2012). 34. Quotations at pp. 543, 550. 35. p. 573. 36. Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), chaps. 5, 6, 8, and 9; James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power (Stroud, 1999). 37. Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 38. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge, 1993); Karen O. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1995). Brenner has been sharply criticized. See, for example, John Morrill, ‘Conflict Probable or Inevitable’, New Left Review, 1.207 (1994): 113–23; and Richard Grassby’s review in the William and Mary Quarterly, 50.4 (1993): 808–12. 39. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (London, 2009). 40. This was once an important theme in the literature, now revived on a bolder scale by Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2013). 41. See, for example, Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles:  Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2004).

Further Reading Adamson, John, ‘Introduction: High Roads and Blind Alleys: The English Civil War and its Historiography’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War:  Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49 (Basingstoke, 2009), 1–35. Burgess, Glenn, ‘On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33.3 (1990): 609–627. Cogswell, Thomas, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, ‘Revisionism and its Legacies: The Work of Conrad Russell’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain:  Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), 1–17.

20   Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland Hughes, Ann, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd edition (Basingstoke, 1998). MacLachlan, Alastair, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History (Basingstoke, 1996). Morrill, John, The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (London, 1993). Russell, Conrad, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990). Stone, Lawrence, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (London, 1972). Worden, Blair, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London, 2001).

Chapter 2

P ost-Refor mat i on P olitics, or on not L o oking f or t h e L ong-Term C au se s of the English C i v i l  Wa r Peter Lake

This chapter describes certain changes in what we might term the political culture, in the ways in which ‘politics’ were conceived and conducted, in the post-Reformation period. The claim being made here is not that these changes caused the civil war, but rather that they ensured that when a series of linked political crises in three kingdoms came together to produce the events formerly known as the English revolution, the resulting crisis took on forms very different from anything that had come before and they did so because of a distinctively post-Reformation political world.

Post-Reformation Politics The advent of heretical ideas (subsequently known as ‘protestant’) in the 1520s and 1530s, and the subsequent course of the English Reformation/s, put disputes about the nature of true religion and the locus of spiritual and ecclesiastical authority at the centre of events. A number of different groups thereby acquired an interest in using a variety of media to spread their view of the situation to a variety of publics, while denouncing their opponents of the moment as some sort of subversive/heretical or deviant threat to ‘order’. Initially these contests took the fairly straightforward form of show-down between an orthodox (‘Catholic’) establishment and some sort of heretical, ‘Lutheran’ or later ‘sacramentarian’ opposition. But very rapidly the course of the

22  Post-Reformation Politics king’s divorce and the breach with Rome meant that what was involved was a series of conflicts between different elements within or around the regime. John Fisher may have started off orchestrating, on behalf of an ultra orthodox king, an official defence of ‘orthodoxy’ against the heresies of Luther, but he rapidly became a rabid opponent of, and author of a variety of manuscript tracts against, the king’s divorce and ended up as a martyr for the papal primacy.1 Thomas More underwent a similar pilgrimage from defender of the establishment against heresy to opponent of royal policy, aider and abetter of the nun of Kent, and a form of (deeply ambivalent) ‘Catholic’ martyrdom. From the outset recourse to a range of public media, to print, the pulpit, various sorts of show trial and performance was as much a tactic of members of the establishment, as it was of an insurgent ‘reforming opposition’. Throughout the 1530s recourse to that full range of public media, up to and including the popular stage, was to remain a central feature of the Henrician regime as it was forged and run by Thomas Cromwell. Indeed, from the very outset, it would not be going too far to locate the origins of ‘the post-Reformation public sphere’ rather more in the activities of central members of the establishment than their various opponents.2 Of course, both reformers located well outside the mainstream and outright opponents of the Henrician Reformation attempted, in a variety of ways, to go public; using rumour, circulating manuscript and the pulpit, as well of course, as print, to make their case before a variety of audiences and/or readerships. But, throughout, the innovatory and contested nature of Henrician reform ensured that it was elements within the regime who often made the running; justifying (often rather radical) change, attempting to gloss events and official policies in their own sense and interest, while responding to, and indeed exploiting for their own reformist purposes, outbreaks of resistance and dissent. We might think that the resulting public sphere would therefore be centrally concerned with ‘religion’, that is to say, structured around an emergently confessional opposition between the ‘gospel’ and its popish enemies, or viewed from the other side, between various (‘Catholic’) versions of ‘orthodoxy’ and their heretical others. And so, to a certain extent, it was. But because of the form that the Henrician Reformation took, because at its core, or at least in its origins, it was a struggle for jurisdiction and power between crown and papacy, religious questions of idolatry and right worship, of superstition and true belief, became inextricably bound up with (quintessentially political) questions of allegiance and treason. The ideological hybridity of the master category—popery—through which the resulting divisions and tensions were mediated showed this only too well. For as the word itself implies, as well as being a nexus of religious error and superstitious trumpery, at bottom, popery was all about loyalty to the pope, its adherents characterized by a residual hankering after the papal primacy. As a result, at certain crucial moments, the proponents of what we might see as rather radical religious change were able to cast themselves as the defenders of order and royal authority, while outing their rivals and opponents, the defenders of traditional religion,

Peter Lake   23 as subversives, bent, not on defending central features of the religious status quo, but rather on disobeying their prince and undoing the Royal Supremacy. For their part, the opponents of further religious change had recourse to the language of evil counsel, picturing a king misled by low-born and heretical evil counsellors into disastrous policies from which he needed to be recalled, either by the plaints and petitions of his subjects (the Pilgrims of Grace) or by the sharply worded admonitions of his ex-clients and favourites (Reginald Pole).3 By the late 1530s and 1540s, the result was a struggle for power under, and influence over, the crown, conducted in terms of two opposed rhetorics: one centred on the threat of popery, conceived as a question of political loyalty and obedience, but with obvious (but also intensely contested) religious connotations; the second on the threat of heresy, and of sacramentarianism, in particular, a religious phenomenon which—because of the king’s personal insistence on the doctrine of transubstantiation as a sine qua non of orthodoxy—brought with it connotations of disobedience and sedition. The fall of Cromwell might well be seen as the triumph of the latter over the former, but that triumph was anything but complete and the two discursive positions, and the groups and individuals who deployed them, continued to jockey for position throughout the 1540s.4 Henry VIII self-consciously exploited a rhetoric of moderation and the mean in order to maintain, indeed to maximize, his position as the ultimate arbiter of the nature of order and of orthodoxy and of the relative seriousness of the threats with which his rule was confronted. But this placed the royal person and the workings of the royal will and conscience at the eye of the ideological storm, since, in a period characterized by various sorts of religious division, attempts to display and vindicate the royal conscience, even of the most intentionally univocal, non-dialogic sort, tended to become, if not an invitation, then certainly, a provocation to debate.5 The official ideology of the Edwardian regimes and Reformation was framed in precisely the same terms. Popery retained its political elements, of course, but its role as a nexus of religious error, of superstition and idolatry, of trickery and trumpery, as indeed the mystery of iniquity, the religion of Antichrist, and thus as a world historical force with a major role to play in God’s providential plan for the triumph of his true church, now came to the fore.6 As Henrician texts like Bales’s play King Johan show,7 this was not a novel view of popery but it was now placed front and centre in the public discourse of the national church, a church whose claims to orthodoxy were now vindicated by solidarity with the foreign reformed churches and a common crusade against the linked (and similarly Antichristian) forces of popery, on the one hand, and Anabaptist and sectarian radicalism, on the other. Here, then, were recognizable but by no means identical, versions of the limiting extremes that had been used to define the Henrician mean. But they were now being adopted to legitimate not a Henrician compromise that had satisfied no one other than Henry VIII, but rather a version of the English church as part of a wider reformed cause, what Diarmaid McCulloch has termed the Strasbourg–St Gall connection.8

24  Post-Reformation Politics

Elizabeth’s Reign and the Rise of Anti-Puritanism And that Edwardian view of the world started out as the framework within which the Elizabethan church was conceptualized and defended by its first apologists. The great innovation of Elizabeth’s reign was what we might term the internalization of antisectarian rhetoric, as anti-puritanism. In Edward’s reign that language had been used to associate the English church with the foreign reformed churches in the common defence of an emergent reformed orthodoxy. Now it was introjected, to precisely opposite effect, into the conduct of intra-Protestant debates between defenders of the ecclesiastical status quo and proponents of various styles and modes of further reformation. The central figure here was John Whitgift who, in an extended exchange with the leading presbyterian ideologue of the day, Thomas Cartwright, deployed the Edwardian version of the two extremes used to define the via media of the English church, popery, and Anabaptism, to exclude, as he hoped, the likes of Cartwright and his ilk, from the charmed circle of English Protestant respectability. True to the spirit of his Edwardian forebears, Whitgift sought to assimilate Cartwright and his associates both to popery and to Anabaptism, using what he took to be their ultra-scripturalism and populism to associate them with the latter and what he took to be their clericalist opposition to the Royal Supremacy to associate them with the former. Ostensibly a form of religious polemic, Whitgift’s anti-puritanism was also inherently political. It dealt with issues of governance and jurisdiction and stressed heavily the extent of direct royal authority over ecclesiastical affairs. In so doing it encoded within itself a set of (intensely monarchical) political values, defined against what he took to be the ‘popularity’ inscribed within presbyterian theory and puritan political practice. By popularity Whitgift meant a commitment to theories of government in which the role of the people was expanded. But he also used the term to refer to the political methods used by the supporters of the discipline to put their case to a variety of more or less popular publics through the pulpit and the press, and through the circulation of manuscripts and of rumours and a variety of petitioning campaigns, some of them aimed at the parliament rather than at the prince.9 Thus by the early 1570s the dual threats of puritanism and of popularity had been equated the one with the other, and the sinister influence of the lay patrons of the puritan movement identified as operating in and through both. Anti-populist and anti-puritan reaction played a crucial role in the fall of Archbishop Grindal and the subsequent rise of Whitgift, and when, in 1583–4, Whitgift sought to enforce subscription on the clergy at a moment when popery seemed to be on the march this produced a clash, in parliament, in the council, and at court, between two agendas, the one dominated by the threat of puritanism and the other by that of popery. The consequent show-down ended in something of a tie. But the Whitgiftian offensive provoked a revival of the presbyterian agitation, a revival which first culminated in, and then broke apart over, the

Peter Lake   25 Marprelate affair, an outbreak of populist pamphleteering that enabled Whitgift and his ally Sir Christopher Hatton to move definitively against the presbyterian movement. Lord Burghley, who had never signed on to the Whitgiftian anti-puritan agenda, persisted with a view of the current conjuncture centred on the linked threats of popery and Habsburg universal monarchy, a view to which he committed the queen and realm in a rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish proclamation of 1591.10 On the extremes, and at moments of high tension, anti-puritanism and anti-popery were opposed discourses. While the godly maintained that the puritan threat was a fabrication, that those accused of puritanism were simply the most zealous and reliable of the queen’s subjects and that the real threat came from popery, various Catholics and crypto-Catholics maintained that most English Catholics were entirely loyal subjects and that the real threat came from the puritans. But for anyone within or attached to the regime it became essential to balance the discourse of anti-popery with that of anti-puritanism. The conventional view—certainly Burghley and Leicester’s view—was that irritating and irresponsible as some of the more obstreperous of the puritans could be, the threat from popery was incomparably the greater, and that, all in all, given the severity of the popish threat, the puritans, so called, were best viewed as a part, indeed as rather a big part, of the solution rather than as any part of the problem.11 The claim advanced by the likes of Whitgift, his client and henchman Bancroft, and his ally Sir Christopher Hatton, that popery and puritanism were equivalent threats was thus both novel and deeply disruptive of the structuring assumptions that had underpinned the high Elizabethan regime. However, by the 1590s, that view—which was also the queen’s—was becoming widespread.12 So, in many ways from the later 1530s, and certainly from the early 1570s, we have two rival accounts of the major religio-political threats to the regime in play, one centred on popery and the other on puritanism. The resultant discourses were, in an obvious sense of the word, ‘religious’, but they were also inherently ‘political’, not only because they dealt with questions of government and jurisdiction, but also because they encapsulated a variety of political values and principles about the nature of popularity, of tyranny, about the right ways in which crucial truths of right religion ought to be communicated to the people and defended from the proponents of error.

Polemic, Conspiracy Theory, and the Public Sphere And this was a practical as well as a theoretical or ideological issue, since in both cases, the truth had to be publicly defended. Both presbyterians and the papists claimed (and very probably believed) that if they could be allowed to present their cases in public before prince and people, the truth of their cause would be vindicated, the prince converted, and right religion, as they understood it, established. The presbyterians

26  Post-Reformation Politics repeatedly made that claim and the famous mission of Campion and Parsons of 1580 was in many ways organized around it. Now the authorities never quite gave in to such demands, but they did feel called upon, repeatedly in print, and in the pulpit and the university disputation, to refute, at great length, the arguments of the other side.13 As the thousands of pages of formal polemic launched by various, often officially sponsored, defenders of the English church against both the presbyterians and the papists show, there was a widespread sense that such challenges could be neither ignored nor simply suppressed. They had to be answered, and seen to be answered, in public. Divines of all stripes acknowledged that the refutation of error was a crucial means whereby God’s truth could be vindicated and disseminated. Such assumptions had been a feature of the theological and cultural scene since at least the beginning of the Reformation in England. There was thus a straight line to be drawn from the efforts of Fisher and More against Tyndale and his ilk, to the vast tomes of anti-papal polemic produced, under Elizabeth, by the likes of Jewel, Fulke, and Whitaker and the equally voluminous works of anti-presbyterian polemic produced, during the same period, by Whitgift and Bridges, Cooper and Bancroft, Saravia, Sutcliffe, and Hooker. Much of the time, these debates and exchanges were of the most recondite sort and must have engaged the attention only of the most learned of audiences. But these disputes were also conducted at far more demotic levels, through cheap print and performance, designed to reach promiscuously mixed, indeed popular, audiences.14 The result was the repeated conduct, before a variety of differently constituted audiences, of some of the central religio-political debates of the age, and the dissemination, at a number of cultural and social levels, of the discourses of both anti-popery and anti-puritanism. The assumption of the inherent, scripturally based righteousness of their own cause prompted nearly all of the parties to have recourse to various sorts of conspiracy theory to explain the failure of their cause to prevail, and in particular the failure of the monarch of the moment to see things their way. Confronted by the confounding capacity of their king serially to defend the cause and course of reformation, Henrician conservatives had had recourse to evil counsellor theory; a view of the matter whereby often low-born evil counsellors, motivated either by heretical zeal or, more often, by private ambition and the will to power, had misled the king into supporting the cause of heresy and error, by playing on and enabling his weaknesses and passions. Confronted by the refusal of Queen Elizabeth to see things their way, both puritans and Catholics had recourse to similar conspiracy theories. Puritans saw the queen misled by a corrupt episcopal faction, who, determined to preserve their own position, denounced the puritans to the queen as enemies to all order in church and state, while telling the godly that they were really on their side, if only they could get the queen to come round. The Catholics told an altogether more interesting and complicated tale, whereby Elizabeth had fallen victim to a tight clique of low-born machiavels and atheists, who persuaded her that only by repudiating the power of the papacy could she secure the crown. They then used the fact of religious change as the pretext to exclude from her counsels the largely Catholic ancient nobility and to expel Catholics from the church,

Peter Lake   27 creating a pool of patronage through which they could secure a monopoly of power under and around the crown and build factional support in church and state. By virtually inventing a popish threat, where none in fact existed, this clique had managed to persuade Elizabeth that only they and their creatures could protect her from the machinations of her (popish) enemies, both at home and abroad. Central to their schemes had been the succession. First, they had persuaded Elizabeth not to marry, and then sought to alienate her from her natural heir, Mary Stuart, whom they portrayed, not as Elizabeth’s natural successor, and thus as the ultimate bulwark against sedition and disorder, but rather as her greatest enemy. Their ultimate aim, having deprived Elizabeth of an heir of her body and of her next successor, was to move against the queen herself and, having removed her from the scene, to divert the succession in their own interest.15 These commentaries on the contemporary scene were written and produced, for the most part, by religious engagés. But despite that, these texts affected to be largely devoid of confessional parti pris and propagated an entirely secular vision of politics, in which the only role for religion was to provide a cover for political manoeuvre. Power was the protagonists’ only God and ‘policy’ their means to achieve that wholly secular end. The templates these tracts used, and to which they referred their readers, to understand the current conjuncture were often historical, taken from the history of pagan Rome and of high and late medieval England, in particular from the Wars of the Roses. The tracts thus operated as exercises in politick history, applying lessons and templates derived from the past to the present and the immediate future in an effort to decode just what was happening now and what was likely to happen next.16 In its later iterations this Catholic critique contained an account of the regime as a veritable protection racket, the participants in which, in the queen’s name, but in their own interests, were oppressing and bilking the subject to fund their endless war with Spain and to line their own pockets and those of their clients and hangers-on. Abusing the legal system to defend their own interests, they appropriated and abused the prerogative powers of the crown in the pursuit, not of the public good, but of their own, private, interests. Misleading the queen about the real condition of her realm, they patronized and protected their own puritan followers, while persecuting the queen’s entirely loyal Catholic subjects, whose treatment at the hands of the regime stood as a synecdoche for its wider attitude towards the subject and the commonweal. Recourse to this sort of libellous secret history had first been made not by some group of embittered and defeated outs, but by members of the regime itself, desperate to discredit Mary Stuart after her deposition in Scotland, flight to England, and projected match with the duke of Norfolk. Indeed, the first recourse to this mode of argument by the Catholics, in The treatise of treasons, had been in response to that initial (pseudo-official) assault upon Mary. Rather than confer credibility on these libels by attempting directly to refute them (tempted though Burghley certainly was), the regime and its creatures told stories about the ‘real life’ conspiracies of the papists themselves, bringing before the public a succession of Catholic plots to kill the queen and replace her with Mary Stuart. The result was a propaganda war prosecuted through all the available media; various sorts

28  Post-Reformation Politics of performance, show trials and executions, through the pulpit, through rumour and a variety of different sorts of print, proclamations, official or pseudo-official tracts and squibs, and printed sermons.17

A Climactic Point? The 1590s By the final decade of Elizabeth’s reign, three widely canvassed, alternative, but by no means always incompatible, conspiracy theories were available for the analysis and conduct of politics; the anti-popish, the anti-puritan, and one centred on evil counsel, court corruption, and the pursuit by the powerful of private, rather than public, interests. While the first two were ‘religious’—in the case of anti-popery, based on an intensely eschatological reading of history—they encoded crucial political assumptions and values. If the third was entirely secular it had been produced and deployed in the course of, and in order to interpret, the intensely confessional dynastic politics of Elizabeth’s reign. Moreover, it was easily spliced together with one or other of the other two narrative templates, since the corrupt evil counsellors at hand could be outed either as puritans or, rather more often, as papists, their manoeuvres designed not merely to further their private material interests and ambitions but also the cause of (false) religion, which of course, in its turn, served to legitimate and enable their own further pursuit of profit and power. Each of these narratives had been canvassed and contested, repeatedly, in public. The conduct of such disputes was always intermittent, crisis-related, and intensely contested; that is to say, the broaching of such issues before a variety of promiscuously uncontrolled publics never became anything like either licit or quotidian. However, the exigencies which prompted such behaviour, even in some of the most powerful and well-connected persons in the kingdom, as well as the regime’s leading critics and opponents—that is to say in Burghley and Essex, in Whitgift and Bancroft, as much as in Thomas Cartwright, John Field, or Robert Parsons—were frequent and pressing enough for this to have become a settled, albeit never a normative, feature of the religio-political scene, and a familiar, and even necessary, part of the toolkit of many of the leading political players and ideologues of the day. These discourses—anti-popery, anti-puritanism, and the politique analysis of evil counsel—have been identified by many historians as crucial to the ways contemporaries viewed, and sought to act upon, the events that led to the English civil war. And we have found them to be established features of the political and discursive scene by the 1590s, which, since the English civil war did not, in fact, start in the 1590s, means that, on their own, they can hardly figure as causes of that war. Nor was there anything intrinsically radical, or even necessarily oppositional, in any of these discourses. Both anti-popery and anti-puritanism had claims to something like official status; certainly they were used by supporters of (various versions of) the status quo to defend it against differently conceived sources of danger. Nor was there

Peter Lake   29 anything radical about the ideal of service to the commonweal or about the idea that political virtue was best defined as the pursuit of the public, rather than of private, interest. Evil counsel was merely the binary opposite, the defining other, of good counsel, the ‘public’, the defining other of the ‘private’, and ‘corruption’ the inevitable result of the pursuit of the latter rather than of the former. These were commonplaces, even clichés, obvious truths to which virtually everyone would assent. The same was true, of course, about both popery and puritanism, which were, after all, terms of opprobrium and thus, as often as not, to be found in the eye of the beholder. As the Catholic critiques of the Elizabethan regime had shown, one person’s epitome of Ciceronian virtue and true religion could be another’s evil counsellor, machiavel, and practical atheist. And, thus, all of these discourses only became controversial in the application; that is to say, when it became time to decide just who was a puritan or who a papist or indeed an evil, as opposed to a virtuous, counsellor. For the most part, under Elizabeth, the potential within these discourses for generating internecine, intra-Protestant, dispute had been kept under control. From the late 1560s until the 1590s popery remained public enemy number one as a childless and unmarried queen confronted an uncertain future, her nearest heir a papist, and protracted conflict with Spain. Moreover, the need to maintain a unified front against the popish foe constituted a real constraint on the conduct of internal political argument. Thus, with the notable exception of certain presbyterian and radical puritan critiques of the bishops, arguments about evil counsel and court corruption remained the preserve of Catholic polemicists.18 However, in the later 1590s, the ideological materials long held in place by this political force field began to shift. That decade saw the final crackdown on the puritan movement, followed by the Archpriest Controversy, in which a Catholic faction, the so-called appellants, sponsored by Bancroft and Robert Cecil, attempted to expand the logic of anti-puritanism to encompass (Calvinist) doctrine in order to establish their loyalist credentials. They did this by harping on what they portrayed as the equally subversive threats represented by the Jesuits and the puritans, and on their support for James VI as the next monarch of England.19 Amongst the more radical puritans all this elicited not merely an upsurge of separatist activity, but a strand of political critique which associated episcopacy, and the current ecclesiastical policies of the regime, with an assault on both the religious and legal liberties of the subject, an assault akin to popish tyranny.20 But perhaps most spectacularly, in the run-up to the Essex rebellion both the earl himself and James VI can be found applying the basic tenets of the Catholic evil counsellor narrative to the doings of the inner circle of the regime, whom they suspected of doing a deal with Spain over both the peace and the succession, the better to perpetuate their own hold on power. Not only that but, after the debacle of the earl’s ‘rebellion’, the regime sought to turn precisely the same claims against Essex; now he was the one dealing with the enemy and making eyes at the papists—and in the Bye and Main plot precisely the same sort of claim and counter-claim continued to figure in the high politics of regime change, even after the accession of King James.21

30  Post-Reformation Politics

All Change? The Early Stuart Political Scene Certainly, James’s accession both removed the threat of a popish succession and ended the war with Spain. That, together with his status as Mary Stuart’s son, raised Catholic hopes for some sort of toleration and his reign opened with a bout of public petitioning and positioning, as both Catholics and puritans agitated for religious change in their favour. The Gunpowder Plot, though, seemingly reinstantiated popery as a unifying and univocal other but James refused fully to exploit the anti-papal card. Instead, he preferred to use the oath of allegiance to highlight his own views of Christian kingship and, following the logic of Richard Bancroft’s earlier sponsorship of the appellant clergy, to divide and rule English Catholics, while maintaining the (Elizabethan) claim that English Catholics were only punished for their political disloyalty and disobedience rather than for their religious beliefs.22 Moreover, over the long haul, James’s accession meant the return to court of various Catholic and crypto-Catholic interests and individuals, clustered around certain foreign Catholic ambassadors, like the notorious Gondomar; around James’s wife—Ann of Denmark—and also around the ex-Marian and crypto-Catholic, Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, now, after years in the political wilderness under Elizabeth, elevated to prominent positions at court and on the council. The presence of such Catholic elements was a function of James’s self-consciously absolutist style of kingcraft, which, as both an ideology and a rhetorical strategy, tended to equate presbyterian-puritan and Jesuit(ed)-papist threats to the (absolute) powers of princes and the national churches over which, by divine right, they presided.23 James saw the careful balancing of different confessional and factional groupings, and the exploitation of the fault lines between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ papists and puritans, as the essence of successful kingship and he rated very highly his own practice of the necessary political arts. Jacobean kingcraft required the presence of various sorts of Catholic at court.24 Moreover, as Michael Questier has shown, the influence of such ‘papists’ increased, or at least appeared to increase, at those moments when a Catholic match for either of James’s two sons hove into view, as the balance of both James’s ecclesiastical and foreign policies required that it should.25 When we add James’s capacity, when it suited him, to play the anti-puritan card—although here, as a number of scholars have observed, his bark was always considerably worse than his bite and anyway everything turned (as always) on just who was included under that term—we can appreciate, at certain crucial moments, just how bad things could look from a puritan perspective and how easy it was to have recourse to the language of anti-popery and evil counsel to explain what was happening or, worse still, what might be about to happen next.26 At the same time, the financial exigencies of the regime, compounded both by James’s notorious personal extravagance, the presence at court of various Scots office-holders

Peter Lake   31 and hangers-on, and latterly by his propensity to shower offices and money upon pretty young men, virtually invited critiques of court-based corruption and even evil counsel; critiques which fitted all too well with existing patterns of anti-popery. Freed from the constraints operative under Elizabeth, anti-popery thus became available as a means to critique central aspects of the regime. This represented a very considerable sea-change from the reign of Elizabeth. Partly in reaction to such developments, the analysis of puritan popularity came to be applied to the activities of the critics of the regime, who were increasingly portrayed as subversive ‘tribuni plebis’, ambitious and unscrupulous men, who, by posing before the people as champions of various sorts of ‘liberty’, and protectors of the Commonwealth from various sorts of corruption, sought to enhance their own status and power at the expense of the just prerogatives of the crown and the authority of its officers. Here was the equivalent of evil-counsellor speak, a code through which the actions and attitudes of men who regarded themselves as quintessentially loyal subjects of the crown and zealous servants of the Commonwealth could be redescribed in the most virulently hostile and denunciatory of terms, their defence of the public good turned into the pursuit of private advantage, and what they regarded as their attempts to redress the grievances of the subject into so much rabble-rousing self-promotion.27 Just as with the critiques of court corruption and evil counsel, there were more (or less) secular versions of popularity. Just as much as those organized around evil counsel and court corruption, narrative templates centred on ‘popularity’ had roots in a variety of (secular) historical and classical texts. Thus, ‘popularity’ did not have to be associated with puritans, any more than court ‘corruption’ or evil counsel had to be associated with ‘papists’. But those elisions and equivalences were very often either assumed or asserted, in ways that underline yet again how ostensibly religious ideologies—in this case, anti-popery and anti-puritanism—also encoded and expressed a series of political values and judgements. All of which enabled those ideologies to be mixed and matched with other, more obviously secular and politique, strands of analysis and argument, and applied, as explanatory tools, to the course of (what might appear to a modern eye to be almost wholly ‘political’) events.28 This extension of the internal logic of anti-puritanism was not limited to the realm of secular politics, however. It also underlay the sea-change in religious policy commonly known as ‘the rise of Arminianism’ or ‘Laudianism’. This fundamental shift operated at a number of distinct but related levels—formal theology, liturgical practice and worship, personal and collective piety. It encoded a distinctive vision of the relations between the sacred and the profane, the nature of God’s presence in the world, of the relationship of the English church to its Catholic past and to other contemporary churches, both Catholic and reformed, of the Christian community, of the visible church, and of the role of the priesthood in both, not to mention in the wider political and social orders; all of which was defined against a vision of puritan disorder, deviance, and error. Crucial here was an attempt to label as deviant and ‘puritan’ certain ‘Calvinist’ doctrines, which their adherents regarded as not only, in some general sense, ‘orthodox’ but also as the official doctrine of the national church. Central predestinarian doctrines and beliefs

32  Post-Reformation Politics were denounced as radically disintegrative of the Christian community and as subversively antinomian in their impact on Christian conversation and therefore as utterly incompatible with monarchical rule.29 While the polemical or ideological logic at work here was plain enough, the political and polemical stakes were very high. Both Whitgift and Cartwright had accepted the assumption that the church of England’s doctrine had been, in some fundamental sense, reformed. This had been an organizing principle of the high Elizabethan and Jacobean establishments and a key factor in the continuing attachment of even quite radical puritans to the national church. Both times the discourse of anti-puritanism had been extended to attack Calvinist theology—first in the 1590s and then in the 1620s—it had been done on the back of an outbreak of virulently political anti-puritanism; the first occasioned by the final assault on the presbyterian movement of the early 1590s, the second by the vocal opposition to the prospect of a Spanish match in the late 1610s and early 1620s. While the first attempt failed, the second succeeded, culminating, after a prolonged period of ambivalence and indecision, in the later 1620s, in the Laudianism of the Caroline church.30 These changes destabilized crucial terms like popery and puritanism, making them available for application, not merely to various, differently constituted, external threats, but to disputes and controversies conducted within what had been the mainstream of English Protestantism. The result was that, by the 1620s and 1630s, members of the same episcopal bench could be outed, by different groups, as either papists or puritans, and, while some could find popery operating at the very centre of the royal court, others claimed to detect puritanism at work amongst self-professedly conformist clergy or the most zealously active of the local gentry.31 The 1590s and the 1620s were in many ways remarkably comparable decades. Both were dominated by wars waged against the great Catholic power of the age. Both were marred by economic crises, caused by plague and, in the case of the 1590s, dearth, and of the 1620s, trade depression. Both featured increasingly polarized and bitter court politics, centred on a beleaguered royal favourite and a seemingly dysfunctional war effort. Both contained increasingly bitter religious disputes and an attempt to extend an existing rhetoric of anti-puritanism to the realm of doctrine. In both decades, fiscal strains consequent upon the prosecution of the war produced complaints about the costs of war and the perversion of the prerogative powers of the crown. But in the 1620s, tropes and accusations, narrative techniques and polemical moves, that, under Elizabeth, had been limited to the Catholic or radical puritan fringe invaded mainstream intra-Protestant political and religious argument. On the political side of the ledger, we have the rhetoric of evil counsel, a tendency to see the regime as dominated by a narrow clique of often low-born favourites, and in the puritan version of the story, of ambitious prelates, battening off the patronage of the crown, misleading the monarch into disastrous policies both at home and abroad, while lining their own pockets, favouring their own cronies and creatures, and oppressing the subject. On the religious side, we have a tendency to characterize the dominant position of the English church as, in some narrowly sectarian sense of the word, ‘Calvinist’, to see Protestants and puritans as adherents of

Peter Lake   33 different religions and to cast puritans as inherently subversive enemies of all monarchical authority. Such claims had been central to Catholic attacks on the Elizabethan regime as a conspiracy of evil counsel, attacks which, by the early 1590s, were presenting the abuses and oppressions of the regime—imprisonment without trial amongst them—as a tyrannical assault upon an ancient legal and constitutional status quo. To take two examples, the claim that James I  had been poisoned by the duke of Buckingham, upon which much of the impeachment proceedings against the duke turned, was a direct product of The forerunner of revenge, a tract by one Dr Eglisham, who was by that point a Catholic exile in Flanders, where his screed was printed. Here was a classic (Catholic) exercise in libellous secret history being directly introduced, without difficulty or demur, into mainstream English political discourse.32 Again, when Charles I imprisoned the five knights, without trial, for their refusal to pay the forced loan of 1626, he was doing no more to them than the Elizabethan regime had done to countless refractory Catholics. This time, however, the result was not the acquiescence of the Protestant political nation in the customary exercise, for the common good, of widely accepted extralegal royal powers, but rather a replication, on the floor of the House of Commons, of the cries of foul with which at least some English Catholics had greeted their treatment at the hands of the Elizabethan regime. This was followed by the petition of right, an attempt legally to reinstantiate precisely the ancient rights and liberties that various Catholics had accused the Elizabethan regime of infringing, and which, by the 1620s, many of his Protestant subjects thought needed uncompromising reassertion in the face of the recent conduct of their king.33 Moreover, by the 1620s, the practice of politics as a form of ‘popularity’, the deployment before various publics of these three narratives, had become entirely self-conscious. Again, this was a long-term trend, with its roots in the later sixteenth century. Francis Bacon, who, along with the likes of John Williams, proffered his services to James and the duke as an expert in such things, was a crucial figure linking the two periods, and indeed those two, oft-compared, popular favourites, Essex and Buckingham, together.34 Moreover, throughout the 1620s, even Buckingham, whose power as a royal favourite originated almost entirely at court, played the game of popularity before a range of audiences, with both pertinacity and skill. Even Charles I felt the need at crucial moments to explain himself to his people, often at considerable length.35 Not only was this being done self-consciously within the closed circles of the regime; contemporaries, in a number of venues, reflected and commented upon that process, perhaps most notably in the public theatre, where famously A game at chess staged the vision of politics as a game of move and counter-move, in the course of which the conspiracies and duplicities of one’s opponents had to be seen through and countered. In The staple of news Ben Jonson responded to these impulses. In a series of plays, both comedies and political tragedies, Jonson fed off and played with the absurdities and duplicities of contemporary politico-religious discourse, both commenting upon and enlisting to his own purposes the anti-Catholic, and particularly the anti-puritan, stereotypes and narratives of the day, all the while satirizing the attempts of outsiders to penetrate within the claims and counter-claims about what was really happening that

34  Post-Reformation Politics made up so much of the contemporary political scene and animated so much of contemporary ‘news culture’. As for Buckingham, in August 1628, at the climactic point of his career, he was quite prepared to resort to the popular stage to send messages about his current condition and future plans, and indeed to perform his own political virtue, before a promiscuously mixed, ‘popular’ audience.36

Not the Causes of the English Civil War; the ‘Post-Reformation Public Sphere’ and the Shaping of Civil War Politics In short, in twenty or so years the constraints placed upon the discourse of anti-puritanism, anti-popery, and evil counsel under Elizabeth had completely broken down. But, of course, since the civil war did not start in the 1620s, we are still not talking about the causes of said civil war. But when the civil war did start, or rather in the period immediately before it started, these were the discourses, the interpretative modes and narrative tropes, through which contemporaries viewed the political process and in terms of which various groups pitched for wider support. And those pitches were made through printed forms and performances, show trials, and public executions, sermons (publicly sanctioned and spontaneous, performed and printed), various types of religious polemic and disputation (again both performed and printed), and, of course, through myriad petitions. All of which forms of communicative practice and political positioning would have made no sense, would, indeed, have been entirely unavailable, without the preceding decades of post-Reformation politicking. Even at this late date, though, it would be hard to argue that the availability of such interpretative modes and communicative practices ‘caused’ the ‘civil war’. What preceded the war itself was an extended cold (propaganda) war. The ‘junto’ and their godly supporters made their pitch for support against a popish conspiracy of evil counsel surrounding the king, and argued for further reformation of both church and state to defeat that conspiracy and defend true religion. The king appealed to a variety of constituencies by picturing central figures in the junto as, in effect, evil counsellors, machiavels and politiques, popular spirits and firebrands, determined to undermine the powers of the monarch and seize power for themselves. He and his partisans conjured a puritan threat to all order in church, state, and society, which centred on puritan attempts to abolish episcopacy, which would undo one of the basic elements in the fabric of both church and state, and unleash populist impulses that might well not stop at the abolition of bishops. Those rival visions of the very recent past, present, and likely future were, of course, canvassed, by both sides, through a greatly expanded public realm of print, preaching, demonstration, petitioning, and a burgeoning news culture.37

Peter Lake   35 What was novel was not the existence of these modes of action, but the speed and intensity, and the sheer volume of the material, in and through which they were conducted.38 But none of this rendered inevitable the outbreak of civil war. For as a number of historians have recently argued,39 there were moments when Charles’s attempts to mobilize anti-puritan, anti-Scots, pro-episcopal opinion, to make himself the head of a body of newly conservative opinion, alienated by the seeming radicalism of the junto and their godly allies, and profoundly disturbed by the tyranny that events like the execution of Strafford seemed to presage, looked as though they might succeed, enabling Charles to regain the political initiative without recourse to arms. The reasons that did not happen might be thought to turn on the fine detail of political manoeuvre, of the judgement and misjudgement, the good and bad timing, not to mention the good and bad luck, of the major players. Even here, therefore, we may not be dealing with ‘the causes of the civil war’. However, while the modes of political and communicative action which contemporaries had learned to use in the century or so following the English Reformation to interpret and act upon political events may not have caused the war, they did profoundly shape the sort of crisis or series of crises that it was or became.

Notes 1. Richard Rex, ‘The English Campaign against Luther in the 1520s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society [TRHS], 5th ser., 39 (1989): 85–106; Alexandra da Costa, Reforming Printing: Syon Abbey’s Defence of Orthodoxy, 1525–1534 (Oxford, 2012); Brad Pardue, Printing, Power and Piety: Appeals to the Public During the Early Years of the English Reformation (Leiden, 2012). 2. On the ‘post-Reformation public sphere’ see Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). 3. G. R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1972); Ethan Shagan, ‘Confronting Compromise: The Schism and its Legacy in Mid-Tudor England’, in Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’:  Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005); Shagan, ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Public Sphere?’, in Lake and Pincus (eds.), Public Sphere, 31–58; Shagan, The Rule of Moderation (Cambridge, 2011), chap. 2. 4. G. R. Elton, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s Decline and Fall’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 10 (1951): 150–85. 5. Shagan, Rule of Moderation, 107–10; Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy (London, 2009). 6. Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester, 2002), esp. chaps. 1–2. 7. Bale’s play, King Johann, illustrates the presence of a certain strand of virulent anti-popery in almost its fully formed state in the late 1530s, its deployment in the course of a bitter faction struggle, and also taken to the street: Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1991), chap. 6. 8. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, 1996), 174f.; also see his ‘Putting the English Reformation on the Map’, TRHS, 15 (2005): 75–95.

36  Post-Reformation Politics 9. Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), chap. 1 and Lake, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy; or John Whitgift, Anti-Puritanism and the Invention of “Popularity” ’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40 (2010): 463–95. 10. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), passim but esp. parts 4, 5, and 8. 11. For an exposition of that view written as it were in Burghley’s name see Francis Bacon’s ‘Certain observations upon a libel’ in Alan Stewart and Harriet Knight (eds.), The Oxford Francis Bacon, Early Writings, 1584–1596 (Oxford, 2012), 343–424, esp. 365–8. 12. Peter Lake, ‘Matthew Hutton:  A  Puritan Bishop?’, History, 64 (1979):  182–204; Patrick Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013). 13. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000): 587–627. 14. The most obvious example of this was, of course, the Marprelate tracts and the reaction thereto sponsored by Bancroft. On which see Joseph Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge, 2008); also see Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, 2002), chaps. 12 and 13. More generally see Antoinjina Bevan-Zlatar, Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (Oxford, 2011). 15. Peter Lake, ‘The “Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I” Revisited (by its victims) as a Conspiracy’, in Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds.), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2004), 87–111; Lake, ‘From Leicester his Commonwealth to Sejanus his Fall: Ben Jonson and the Politics of Roman (Catholic) Virtue’, in Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, 128–61. 16. I hope to discuss the role of the stage and in particular of the history play in popularizing this attitude to both ‘history’ and ‘politics’ and its interpretation in a book on Shakespeare’s history plays and the confessional, dynastic, and factional politics of the 1590s. 17. I summarize here the argument of my Ford lectures of 2011, of which I hope to publish an expanded version under the (provisional) title of Bad Queen Bess? Libelous Politics and Secret Histories in an Age of Confessional Conflict. 18. Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994): 51–92. For the wider point about anti-popery ceasing to be a centripetal and becoming an at least potentially centrifugal force see Carol Z. Weiner, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, Past and Present, 51 (1971): 27–62. 19. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Taking it to the Street? The Archpriest Controversy and the Issue of the Succession’ (forthcoming). 20. Michael Winship, ‘Freeborn (Puritan) English Men and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570–1602’, English Historical Review [EHR], 124 (2000): 1050–60; also see Winship, Godly Republicanism (Cambridge, MA, 2012), chaps. 2 and 3. 21. Arnold Hunt, ‘Tuning the Pulpits: The Religious Context of the Essex Revolt’, in Lori-Anne Ferrell and Peter McCollough (eds.), The English Sermon Revised (Manchester, 2001), 86–114; Mark Nichols, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh’s Treason: A Prosecution Document’, EHR, 110 (1995): 902–24; Nichols, ‘Two Winchester Trials: Henry Lord Cobham and Thomas, Lord Grey of Wilton, 1603’, Historical Research [Hist. Res.], 68 (1995): 26–48.

Peter Lake   37 22. Michael Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, Historical Journal [HJ], 40 (1997): 311–29. For a different view see Johann Sommerville, ‘Papalist Political Thought and the Controversy over the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, in Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’, 162–84. 23. Peter Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart’s True law of free monarchies in context/s’, TRHS, 6th ser., 14 (2004): 243–60. 24. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I’, Journal of British Studies [JBS], 24 (1985): 169–207. 25. Michael Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics 1621–1625 (Cambridge, 2005); Thomas Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish Match’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, Conflict in Early Stuart England (London, 1989), 107–23. 26. Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, HJ, 25 (1982): 805–25. 27. Richard Cust, ‘The Public Man in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Lake and Pincus (eds.), Public Sphere, 116–143; Cust, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), 235–58; Cust, ‘ “Patriots” and “Popular Spirits”: Narratives of Conflict in Early Stuart Politics’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720 (Manchester, 2007), 43–61. 28. Noah Millstone’s research on manuscript separates will transform our knowledge of these topics by documenting in extraordinary detail the sheer scale of the production of, and the breadth of the demand for, such separates, and by demonstrating their role in disseminating a politique vision of politics, in which the central political narrative and the claims advanced by major players had to be decoded if they were to be properly understood. This disseminated much more widely techniques of hermeneutic suspicion previously something of a monopoly of Catholic critics. Millstone’s work opens up a new field of enquiry into how contemporaries actually thought about politics, as opposed to how they played the game of ‘Political Thought’. I should like to thank Dr Millstone for many discussions of these and related subjects, which have played a major role in formulating the position laid out in this chapter. 29. Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603– 1642 (Basingstoke, 1993), 161–85 and Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1994). 30. Peter Lake, ‘The “Anglican Moment”? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s’, in Stephen Platten (ed.), Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition (Norwich, 2003), 90–121, 229–33. 31. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall Explains Himself ’, EHR, 1 (1996): 856–81. 32. The ‘poisoning of James I’ is the subject of important new work by Alastair Bellany and Tom Cogswell, whom I would like to thank for many conversations on this topic. See Thomas Cogswell, ‘The Return of the Dead Alive: The Earl of Bristol and Dr Eglisham in the Parliament of 1626 and in Caroline Political Culture’, EHR, 128 (2013): 535–70. 33. Cf. Mark Kishlansky, ‘Tyranny Denied: Charles I, Attorney General Heath, and the Five Knights Case’, HJ, 42 (1999): 53–83. 34. James’s regime was confronted with the choice of whether or not to play the anti-popish card to explain away the Overbury scandal and Bacon played a crucial role in persuading

38  Post-Reformation Politics James to do no such thing, on which see Alastair Bellany’s seminal book, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002). My thinking on this topic has been much influenced by a sadly unfinished thesis by a former student of mine, Sandeep Kaushik, who did excellent work on Bishop Williams as a sort of self-proclaimed expert in the politics of popularity. 35. Thomas Cogswell, ‘The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and Popularity’, in Cogswell, Cust, and Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity, 211–34; Cogswell, ‘The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the People in the 1620s’, JBS, 29 (1990): 187–215; Cogswell, ‘ “Published by authority”: Newsbooks and the Duke of Buckingham’s Expedition to the Ile of Rhé’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (2004): 1–25; Alistair Bellany, ‘ “Naught but illusion”? Buckingham’s Painted Selves’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (eds.), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2008), 127–60; Bellany, ‘Buckingham Engraved: Politics, Print Images and the Royal Favourite in the 1620s’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2010), 215–35; Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and a Draft Declaration for the 1628 Parliament’, Hist. Res., 63 (1990): 143–61. 36. Thomas Cogswell and Peter Lake, ‘Buckingham Does the Globe: Henry VIII and the Politics of Popularity in the 1620s’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60 (2009): 253–78. 37. For petitioning see Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981). For the ideological cacophony of 1641–2 see David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006). 38. For a case study of petitions and pamphlets ricocheting between the centre and the localities, illustrating that this was no more a monopoly of the puritan, ‘oppositionist’, side of the argument than had it been in the 1520s see Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Cogswell, Cust, and Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity, 259–89. 39. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, 2005), chap. 5.

Further Reading Bellany, Alastair, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002). Braddick, Michael J., ‘Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), 175–193. Cogswell, Thomas, ‘The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and Popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), 211–234. Cogswell, Thomas, ‘The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the People in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies, 29 (1990): 187–215. Cust, Richard, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), 235–258. Cust, Richard, ‘ “Patriots” and “Popular Spirits”: Narratives of Conflict in Early Stuart Politics’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720 (Manchester, 2007), 43–61. Lake, Peter, Bad Queen Bess? Libelous Politics and Secret Histories in an Age of Confessional Conflict (forthcoming).

Peter Lake   39 Lake, Peter and Steve Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). Lake, Peter and Michael Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000): 587–627. Peacey, Jason, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013). Questier, Michael, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England:  English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997): 311–329. Zaret, David, The Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, 2000).

Pa rt  I I

 E V E N T S

Chapter 3

The Rise of t h e C ovenanters, 163 7 –164 4 Julian Goodare

‘It is not a revolt, it is a revolution!’

This is what the duc de Liancourt reportedly told Louis XVI at the time of the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Whether accurately reported or not, the remark has been much quoted because it encapsulates the way in which participants in great events come gradually to realize their significance. For the Scottish Revolution, the equivalent to the storming of the Bastille was the riot in St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, against Charles I’s new Prayer Book, on 23 July 1637. Initially, the authorities saw it as little more than a temporary law and order problem. When petitions against the Prayer Book began to pour in, it gradually became clear that something serious was afoot. Still, it took some time for all concerned to realize that the protests were a revolt. And after that, how much longer did it take them to realize that it was a revolution? Especially since the concept of ‘revolution’ was not as clear in the 1630s as it was in 1789, this latter question will be harder to answer.

From Revolt to Revolution It used to be conventional to ascribe the Scottish revolt to ‘absentee monarchy’, with the king unable to control the situation because he was ‘absent’. But letters took only about four days between Edinburgh and London—and the authorities on the spot were just as out of touch. The prayer book riot took place on 23 July. The privy council issued a proclamation on the 24th ordering people to behave themselves, and talked to the magistrates of Edinburgh, who held responsibility for law and order in the town. They did not write to the king until the 26th. Yet Charles acted quickly in response. He wrote to

44   The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644 the council on the 30th, ordering them to punish the rioters and assist the bishops in ‘setling’ the Prayer Book.1 This letter was written even before Charles received the council’s letter; presumably he had received an earlier letter from the Scottish bishops. At any rate, Charles could hardly have acted more quickly. And his response, though uncompromising, was also unsurprising, given that he was told that the problem was one of law and order. From late July to early September, the authorities in Edinburgh and London did not behave as if they thought they were dealing with a revolt, let alone a revolution. They treated the prayer book riot as a problem of law and order within Edinburgh itself. Yet the authorities in Edinburgh were divided. The privy council contained several bishops, but was dominated by lay councillors who tended to resent the bishops’ influence. The council told the king that the problem had been caused by the bishops’ unseemly haste in introducing the Prayer Book; the bishops instead complained of a failure by the lay authorities to back them up. There was constant buck-passing between the privy council, the burgh magistrates, and the bishop and ministers of Edinburgh, none of whom wanted to take responsibility for arresting the rioters or preventing future riots. Meanwhile, however, protest against the Prayer Book was spreading widely. Initially this took the form of petitions by parish ministers, protesting against the government’s order for them to buy and use the book. But nobles, lairds, and others began to send supporting petitions. Protesters held local meetings, and hundreds of ‘supplicants’ gathered ominously in Edinburgh. The question for the government was no longer who was going to take responsibility for the Prayer Book, but who was going to respond to the ‘supplicants’. The main difference between the various authorities was that some of them—Charles, Archbishop Laud, and some of the Scottish bishops—really wanted the Prayer Book; others—the Scottish lay councillors and the Edinburgh magistrates—did not. The privy council ‘suspended’ the Prayer Book, but saw no need to advise Charles explicitly that he should withdraw it. The earl of Traquair, the treasurer and usual leader of the lay councillors, seems to have assumed that the Prayer Book would soon be abandoned, and that the episode would discredit its promoters. Its most prominent Scottish promoter, John Maxwell, bishop of Ross, was a man whom Traquair had outmanoeuvred in 1636 to become treasurer, and Traquair probably hoped to use the Prayer Book fiasco to press home his advantage. To do that, at first he mainly needed to wait while the Prayer Book’s promoters dug themselves into a hole. He even advised the petitioners on how to make one of their petitions more acceptable to the king. As opposition mounted, the Prayer Book would inevitably be withdrawn, Maxwell would be disgraced, and Traquair himself would emerge as the saviour of the day. If Charles had wanted to compromise, he could have withdrawn the Prayer Book, duly disgracing some advisers such as Maxwell. Some historians have criticized Charles for refusing to take this course, apparently assuming that it would have returned things to the status quo ante. However, this would be a naive assumption. Once Charles had been forced by public protest to abandon his flagship policy, he would have purchased stability at the price of conceding credibility to his critics. Next time he wanted something, he

julian Goodare   45 would have had to make further concessions. For instance, parliamentary taxation had to be renewed every four or six years. The most recent tax had been voted in 1633, with the last instalment due for collection in 1639; another parliament would be required to renew it. It is improbable that such a parliament would have been amenable to the royal wishes. The regime’s most determined critics, as their actions in 1638 would show, would not have been satisfied with a mere return to the status quo ante 1637. The concessions necessary to mollify them would have been sweeping indeed. So it is perhaps not surprising that throughout 1637, Charles and Laud were more receptive to Maxwell’s advice, repeatedly ordering the privy council to enforce the Prayer Book and to arrest the ringleaders of sedition. Unfortunately for them, this was impractical. One intransigent royal proclamation, on 17 October, led next day to a bigger riot in Edinburgh than the initial July one. The magistrates of Edinburgh had joined the protesters in September, and after October’s riot, the privy council could not meet in the town. The king had lost control of his Scottish capital, much as he would later lose his English one. In November, the protesters stepped up their organization. They claimed that some councillors had encouraged them to elect commissioners to represent their case to the government—ostensibly to disperse the threatening mass of petitioners in Edinburgh. Whatever the truth of this, the king’s advocate, Sir Thomas Hope, soon endorsed their action. At any rate, the protesters created a nationwide network of committees, cementing their power locally and centrally. By the spring of 1638 this committee structure became known as the ‘Tables’. There were committees in every shire, sending representatives to four coordinating committees in Edinburgh. These four committees, or ‘Tables’, comprised nobles, shire commissioners, burgh commissioners, and ministers. These in turn elected representatives to a ‘fifth Table’, which coordinated the whole movement. Despite the careful informality of the term ‘Table’, the ‘fifth Table’ was poised to become a provisional government. Faced by continued governmental intransigence (and continued governmental dithering), the protesters launched the National Covenant. It was first signed by leading nobles in Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh, on 28 February 1638. The National Covenant was to become the manifesto of the Scottish Revolution. It was even described at the time as a ‘presbyterian manifesto’.2 In form it was mainly an agreement between the Scottish people and God, but it was also an agreement between the signatories collectively. It claimed to be no innovation—it was the king who was the innovator—but a renewal of a covenant previously made in 1581 and 1590. The text began with the socalled ‘Negative Confession’ of 1581, an anti-Catholic statement issued by James VI and his council which was now taken to constitute a ‘covenant’ on the model of the covenants made between God and the Israelites in the Old Testament. The National Covenant then rehearsed a large number of acts of parliament in favour of ‘true’ religion, and concluded with a bond among the signatories committing them to stand together to maintain that religion and to oppose anyone who tried to change it. The Covenant also committed the signatories to uphold the king’s authority, but everyone understood that this did not involve obedience to the commands of an ill-advised king.

46   The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644 The Covenanters demanded ‘free assemblies and parliaments’ to deal with the innovations and those responsible. This was thus a constitutionalist, anti-absolutist, movement. The National Covenant’s authors, Alexander Henderson, minister of Leuchars, and Archibald Johnstone of Wariston, an Edinburgh lawyer, were both influenced by the great theorist of Dutch resistance, Johannes Althusius.3 The sixteenth-century Scottish thinker George Buchanan was also important. The National Covenant could be interpreted in various ways, and the precise relationship between a religious covenant (between God and people) and a secular contract (between king and people) was less important than the general sense that political and religious authority arose from the community rather than descending from the king. The Covenant was a unifying force rather than a divisive one. It was also a broad-based social movement. The Covenant was signed by everyone who mattered—nobles, lairds, ministers, and burgh councillors—and, in many parishes, by every adult male householder. Naturally the Covenanters sought noble leadership. Early on, prominent roles were taken by those whom Wariston called ‘the pryme foor noblemen’: the earl of Rothes, and Lords Lindsay, Balmerino, and Loudoun.4 None of these were great magnates, but they were backed by the earl of Argyll, who was. Charles insisted correctly that this was not simply a ‘religious’ revolt. The issue of royal and state authority was bound up with it. The Covenanters had many religious objections to the Prayer Book, but one additional objection was crucial: it was not warranted by ‘law’, as expressed in acts of the General Assembly and acts of parliament. Their demand for a ‘free’ General Assembly and a ‘free’ parliament—‘free’ meaning not controlled by the king—was thus about who controlled these bodies, and indeed about who controlled Scotland. General Assembly and parliament, and in the meantime the ‘fifth Table’, would rule. With hindsight, we can see that this was, by now, a revolution. But this was not clear at the time. Charles had lost control of Scotland for the time being, but surely a compromise settlement was near? Or perhaps the king would choose a more confrontational military option? Advice of all kinds reached him. He chose to pursue conciliation for the time being, but always with the proviso that he would crush the ‘rebels’ if they did not submit. Charles’s chosen conciliator was the marquis of Hamilton, a Scottish magnate who had pursued a career as a courtier and who was associated with the Protestant cause on the Continent. Hamilton was commissioned to negotiate with the Covenanters, and to get them to surrender the covenant in return for vague concessions. However, Charles knew that they were unlikely to do so, and he was already planning a military solution if they did not. Hamilton’s visit to Scotland lasted from June until December. He did his best in the negotiations, and advised the king that he should make further concessions in order to reach a settlement. If the king withdrew the Prayer Book, accepted the National Covenant as legal, and summoned a General Assembly and parliament to sort out the Covenanters’ grievances, royal authority might be recovered. It has been suggested that Hamilton himself was more committed to this policy than to the military alternative that the king was pursuing, though this may be only because at the time it was his job to

julian Goodare   47 negotiate. He continued in the king’s active service once the military option came to the fore, and some of his later advice definitely favoured that option. Once the king rejected Hamilton’s suggested concessions, which he did within days, the negotiations were bound to fail—but Hamilton spun them out as long as possible, since the royal forces would not be ready to march until early 1639. He even persuaded the king to agree to the Covenanters’ demand for a General Assembly, by pointing out that if he refused, the Covenanters would hold an assembly anyway. The General Assembly took place in November and December 1638, and made a clean sweep of the crown’s recent innovations, as well as some less recent ones, as we shall see.

Covenanting Grievances How had Charles’s government managed to provoke such strong and united opposition? The Covenanters’ grievances proved to be widespread, manifold, and deep-rooted. This revolt was about far more than the Prayer Book, and indeed about more than religion. It is possible to divide the Covenanters’ grievances into three categories: religious, economic, and constitutional. These to some extent overlapped, and different groups emphasized different aspects, but the National Covenant came to symbolize all three. In religion, the leading Covenanters were committed iure divino presbyterians. Bishops had been reintroduced in Scotland by James VI and I, and commanded little support; debate at the 1638 General Assembly was about whether episcopacy should just be ‘removed’ or whether it should also be ‘abjured’, implying that it was fundamentally unlawful. The decision went in favour of abjuration, and that line was maintained thereafter. Presbyterianism required parity of ministers, and also called for government of the church by committees of ministers. While the former principle was unquestioned, the latter was sometimes tempered by tendencies that if found in England might have been called ‘independency’. General assemblies of 1640, 1641, and 1642 all saw arguments about ‘conventicles’—unofficial religious services. In August 1642, those against conventicles were persuaded not to press the matter ‘for eschewing offence to the good people of England that favoured those ways’.5 One of the biggest grievances, and one that the 1638 General Assembly took care to remove, had been introduced in 1618 by James VI and I. This was the Five Articles of Perth, a group of ceremonies in church worship, of which the most inflammatory was a requirement to kneel at communion. Committed presbyterians regarded kneeling as idolatrous. In seeking to maintain their preferred form of communion service, they had brought into being an underground network of dissident ministers and lay people. Even before Charles’s accession in 1625, religious dissent had become organized. Once the Caroline regime began to unravel, a wide spectrum of economic grievances emerged. These were articulated most clearly in the demands made by the shire commissioners and burgh commissioners—lesser landlords, merchants, and craftsmen—to the parliament of 1639.6 These demands barely mentioned religion. No doubt religion

48   The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644 was thought already to have been taken care of, but the economic grievances were nevertheless real. The crown had issued numerous monopolies in recent decades, mostly to courtiers and court-connected adventurers; the commercial classes objected strongly to them. Both shire and burgh commissioners wanted all monopolies discharged, and added lists of particularly hated monopolies (tobacco and tanning of leather featured in both groups’ lists). The demand for ‘ane commissioun for introduceing of manufactories with seting up of forrane and domestik tradis’ pointed towards the commercial policy that the Covenanters themselves would develop: a framework of statutory regulation for all those engaged in a given enterprise, with fiscal privileges for enterprises in favoured areas. Taxation was no more than a muted grievance; Scotland had hitherto been lightly taxed (and the Covenanters were about to introduce sweeping tax increases). One demand, ‘That nae taxatioun may be grantit bot in parliament’, was constitutional as much as economic. Shire and burgh commissioners also wanted action to facilitate the collection of debts. Aristocratic indebtedness had become prominent in recent decades, and the privy council had tended to protect noble debtors from their creditors. Now the voice of the creditors’ lobby could be heard. One notable economic grievance was absent from the shires’ and burghs’ demands: Charles I’s revocation scheme. This scheme to restructure land tenure was controversial and far-reaching, and many accounts of the Scottish Revolution simply treat the revocation and the Prayer Book as the Covenanters’ two main grievances. However, although there is no doubt that the revocation contributed to the Scottish Revolution, care is needed in assessing whose grievance it was. Charles in 1625 had issued a ‘revocation’ claiming the right to confiscate lands and other rights of church and crown that had been alienated in recent decades, or in some cases at any past date. As well as lands, ‘teinds’ (tithes) were also significant. The crown had no intention of actually confiscating the lands it claimed, but it did want to use the royal claim as a lever with which to engineer three changes. Firstly, landlords should agree to provide higher stipends for ministers. Secondly, since tithes had become a second form of rent, landlords would be empowered to buy out the rights of tithe-holders in order to simplify landlord–tenant relations. Thirdly, the crown would obtain a 6% annuity from surrendered tithes. Tithe commutation was a desirable and forward-looking reform; the English did not achieve it for another two centuries. The machinery that the revocation established for this continued to operate until 1925, and the Covenanters had no objection to it; nor did they object to ministers’ stipends. Much of the problem with the revocation was not the principle, but the complexities of implementation. Various interest groups stood to gain or lose, and outcomes could vary widely depending on operational decisions such as rates of compulsory purchase. Many aspects of the revocation were seen as desirable in principle, but people were unwilling to trust Charles’s government with the practical arrangements. They had to begin by surrendering their possessions to the crown and hoping that they would get them back undamaged.

julian Goodare   49 The Covenanters, nevertheless, did take policy on landholding in some new directions. The revocation had attempted to revive the traditional land tenure of ward and relief (roughly equivalent to knight service in England), which would have facilitated a revival of fiscal feudalism. Instead, after the revolution, landlords were enabled to convert their tenures to feu-ferme, a tenure closer to absolute proprietorship. In constitutional matters, the Covenanters used representative assemblies—parliament and the General Assembly of the church—to remedy their grievances. Their precocious use of parliament followed the precocious way in which the kings of the early seventeenth century had used their prerogative. Even the earliest petitions against the Prayer Book complained that the book had not been sanctioned by parliament or the General Assembly. In November 1637, Wariston was ‘collecting togither a note of the most remarquable acts of Parlement for thir defective tymes’, and studying ‘the poynt of the Kings praerogative—the kitlest [i.e. trickiest] poynt eyther in jure or facto, in kirk or staite disputes’.7 The more intransigent the king became, the more they needed constitutional checks to prevent him returning to his previous policies. It is sometimes thought that the Covenanters differed from English parliamentarians in believing in the theory of two kingdoms, by which the civil government and church were separately governed and the former did not control the latter. In fact the Covenanters were happy for parliament to govern the church; the National Covenant itself listed many acts of parliament in favour of religion, back to the acts of the Reformation Parliament of 1560. Their objection to episcopacy was combined with an objection to the royal supremacy over the church, which they saw as related and as ‘Erastian’; unlike in England, there was no Scottish tradition of using the royal supremacy as a reforming tool. However, Anglo-Scottish differences here were modest; the Scots did believe in parliamentary supremacy, which is what mattered to (for instance) English puritans in the Long Parliament.

The Bishops’ Wars Military planning began at court in January 1638, when the earl of Antrim proposed an Irish attack on Scotland. Soon after that, the earl of Nithsdale outlined a broad plan for an Anglo-Irish attack similar to that attempted in 1639 and 1640.8 This became a mainstream plan with news of the National Covenant, when Charles realized that he had lost control of Scotland—that the Scottish problem was at least a revolt, if not a revolution. He began sending arms to the Scottish royal castles. It was soon realized that English forces could not be mustered before 1639; in the meantime, Hamilton was sent to Scotland at least partly to gain time. This does not mean that Hamilton’s mission was entirely insincere. Throughout, Charles pursued a range of options, from the conciliatory to the aggressive. The latter ideas tended to envisage the punishment of the entire Scottish nation for its disobedience. Among the schemes discussed in Charles’s presence in 1638 were to govern

50   The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644 Scotland by a viceroy, as in Ireland (Wentworth’s idea), or even to partition the country, annexing the southern counties to England.9 Charles’s main idea, though military, was less aggressively anti-Scottish. He assumed that if he turned up at the Scottish border with a large enough army, most Scots would recognize that their duty lay in obedience to the king. Resistance would melt away with little or no actual fighting, and it would be possible to isolate and punish the ringleaders of sedition. The king’s strategists worked out in detail how their armies would reach Scotland, but did not make plans for the conquest or occupation of Scottish territory. As for the Covenanters themselves, they were well aware of the king’s intentions. They were prepared to fight in their own defence, but they knew from the start that their hopes lay in forging links with sympathetic Englishmen, so as to undermine the English war effort. Wariston wrote a pamphlet appealing to the English people, and specifically to a future English parliament, over the king’s head. It was published as war loomed on 4 February 1639, but the Covenanters had already commissioned him to write this ‘Information for Ingland’ on 10 July 1638.10 It was soon followed by a ‘Remonstrance’, published both in English and in Dutch; the argument was becoming international.11 The Covenanters also mobilized for war. The Scottish state had not fought any wars for a long time; there was no standing army, no navy, and no royal guard. One or two royal castles were sometimes important, but the king failed to garrison Edinburgh Castle properly in 1639, and the Covenanters captured it without firing a shot. (Restored to the king in the pacification, the Castle was then given a royalist garrison that would inconvenience the Covenanters throughout the fighting of 1640.) In the Lowlands at least, Scottish noblemen no longer had military retinues. A militia existed on paper, but, unlike in England, little had been done to organize or equip it. However, in other ways, Scotland was well placed to begin military mobilization. The country had long exported fighting men to the Continent—not only common soldiers, but also officers. The officers usually retained links with their homeland, and with the prospect of warfare at home, many experienced officers returned to take part. Some were simply mercenaries pursuing their careers; others were committed Protestants who saw the covenanting wars as an extension of the Continental struggles in which they had fought—often in Swedish service. These men knew how to raise, train, and equip modern regiments, not traditional retinues. The Scottish state funded the war through rapidly modernizing its fiscal capability. The heaviest taxes would come in 1644, with military intervention in England; this period also saw a completely new tax, the excise. But the groundwork for fiscal revolution was laid in 1639, when a revaluation of landed estates was undertaken, allowing a new direct tax (the ‘monthly maintenance’) to be collected on current valuations. Previous rulers had sought this fundamental reform in vain.12 With this financial capability, weapons could be bought on credit. Scotland had a strong mercantile community and a large merchant fleet, with close trading links with the Netherlands, the main suppliers of armaments. The Covenanters spent the latter part of 1638 importing vast amounts of weapons. They had

julian Goodare   51 to ship their supplies from the Continent past the king’s navy. A few Scottish ships were seized, but the royal blockade seems to have been largely ineffective. The Covenanters’ revolt was of international interest. They themselves could not approach foreign powers officially, but they made numerous informal contacts (including an approach to France in 1639). The Netherlands and Sweden favoured them. Christian IV of Denmark sometimes seemed to favour his nephew Charles, but he allowed ships laden with weapons for Scotland to pass through the Sound. In 1640, Charles offered to pawn Orkney and Shetland to Christian, but Christian was uninterested, taking the view that Charles no longer controlled the islands.13 The Swiss Protestant churches wrote letters encouraging the Covenanters and reproving Laud for oppressing them.14 There were two ‘Bishops’ Wars’—or perhaps two phases of a single conflict, since both sides recognized the intervening truce as temporary. The Covenanters began open military activity in February 1639—not at the Anglo-Scottish border, but in the north-east of Scotland, where royalist supporters were mobilizing under the nominal leadership of the marquis of Huntly. Huntly was soon captured, and the royalists eventually recognized that their position was hopeless. Most of these manoeuvres were bloodless, but on 10 May, Sir George Gordon of Gight and other royalists attempted to seize Towie House, held by the covenanting Lord Fraser and master of Forbes. David Prat, Gordon’s servant, was shot and killed—the first person to die in the wars that would soon engulf all three kingdoms.15 Another potential military theatre was the west of Scotland, where the Gaelicspeaking Highland clans were more organized for war than Lowland nobles (though only lightly armed). The two most powerful clans, the Campbells and MacDonalds, had long been rivals. The Campbells, led by the earls of Argyll, had allied themselves with the Lowland government and gained numerous territories from the disunited MacDonalds. One branch of the MacDonalds, meanwhile, had established themselves in nearby Ulster, where they were led by the earl of Antrim. Antrim’s father had made several attempts to recover some of the family’s Scottish properties, and throughout the western Highlands there were resentful MacDonalds who would welcome an opportunity to humble the Campbells. However, instead of mobilizing them, Antrim tried with little success to raise a more conventional Irish army in 1639, while in 1640 his efforts were supplemented by an army raised by the viceroy, Strafford. These armies never reached Scotland, but they forced the Covenanters to retain troops in the west, and confirmed the Campbells as firm supporters of the Covenant. They also led the Covenanters to contemplate pre-emptive invasion of Ireland—something that would soon become a reality. The Covenanters assembled their main army in the eastern Borders in May 1639. From their base at Duns Law they could command the invasion routes from the south. But the invasion never came; the royal forces were not up to it. Throughout both Bishops’ Wars, the Covenanters had better morale, better strategy, and better intelligence. They had weaknesses, sometimes serious, of recruitment and supply, but they successfully masked these from the royalists, and even persuaded them that Scottish forces were larger than they were. An eclipse of the sun on 22 May was said to be God’s

52   The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644 warning against continuing the war, but the main reason why Charles agreed to negotiate in June was that his demoralized commanders feared defeat. The resulting ‘pacification of Berwick’ (18 June) held for the rest of the year, but both sides expected fighting to resume. Before war broke out again, though, two parliaments were held. In England, the ‘Short Parliament’ (13 April to 5 May 1640) refused Charles’s demands for war finance. In Scotland, the Covenanters’ parliament was even shorter (2–11 June 1640), but dramatically successful. It assembled despite the king’s attempts to forbid it to do so, and enacted a sweeping and revolutionary constitutional programme. The religious settlement of 1638–9 was confirmed. A ‘triennial act’ (soon to be copied by the English) enacted that parliaments were to be held every three years at least, whether the king wished it or not. A committee of estates—twelve members from each of the three estates, plus three judges from the court of session—was established to coordinate the executive government of the country in between meetings of parliament. This standing body effectively replaced the privy council. Finally, the 1640 parliament made military preparations. The fighting in the summer of 1640 was more serious than in 1639. Both sides sought a decisive victory. The royal army, however, assembled tardily in Yorkshire, far south of the Scottish border, and showed no sign of invading Scotland. The Covenanters thus took a daring decision. Until now they had presented their war as defensive, and insisted that they had no quarrel with England. But they could not keep their army together indefinitely. Negotiations with the king early in 1640 had enabled them to make contact with dissident English politicians, who encouraged them to believe that Charles’s English regime would collapse internally if discredited. Indeed, the fiasco of the Short Parliament had already revealed Charles’s English unpopularity. So the Covenanters’ army boldly invaded England on 20 August. On the 28th the Scots stormed across the River Tyne at Newburn, driving away an English force that tried to bar their crossing. As the English retreated, the triumphant Scots captured Newcastle on the 30th. The royal defeat in the Bishops’ Wars was comprehensive, and twofold. One aspect of it was simply that the Scots had not submitted to the king. Confronted by a royal army, the more reluctant Covenanters should have defected from the ‘rebel’ cause, leaving the ringleaders isolated; at least, that had been Charles’s hope. Yet the Covenanters had remained united and uncompromising. They had faced their king in arms, and had got away with it. The other aspect of the royal defeat was that even once the Scots had clearly invaded English territory, the English had not rallied to the crown. Instead the Scots succeeded in winning more open friends among Charles’s English opponents. After the capture of Newcastle, this led the Covenanters to take another daring decision. They established their army in the town—the main supply port for London’s coal—and made clear that they were staying until they achieved a favourable settlement. Londoners would have a cold winter unless the Scots were accommodated. In negotiations at Ripon (2–26 October), Scottish and English commissioners agreed a temporary cessation of hostilities, and that England would pay the Scottish army £850 sterling per day from 16 October until a full settlement was reached. Since such

julian Goodare   53 a settlement would take time, and since Charles did not have £850 per day, this necessitated an English parliament that could authorize taxation. Charles had already (on 24 September) issued the summons for what became the ‘Long Parliament’, and it assembled on 3 November; the Scottish victory meant that he could not dissolve this parliament until he had satisfied the Scots. They would take some satisfying.

The Treaty of London From a Scottish point of view, the opening months of England’s Long Parliament were taken up with negotiating the peace settlement that became known as the Treaty of London. Previous negotiations had been between king and Covenanters; this time, the Covenanters insisted on negotiating with English parliamentary commissioners, thus formally involving the English parliament. They demanded royal confirmation of their religious and constitutional settlement of 1638–40, reparations for war damage, punishment of so-called ‘incendiaries’, and arrangements for ensuring that the settlement would be a lasting one. This last point, necessarily vague, entailed Anglo-Scottish measures to ensure that the king would no longer be able to use England to attack Scotland. Effectively the Covenanters aimed to use the negotiations, and their army’s continued presence, to entrench the power of the king’s English opponents. After protracted negotiations, the Treaty of London was settled in the summer of 1641. The king agreed to publish the acts of the 1640 Scottish parliament in his own name, thus accepting its radical settlement. This also indicated that the royal assent was no longer required to acts of parliament; Scotland henceforth would be governed by parliament, with the king lacking even a veto power. The Scots received financial reparations (called ‘brotherly assistance’). A standing Anglo-Scottish parliamentary commission, the conservators of the peace, was established to coordinate the two realms and prevent disputes between them. The Scots’ vague demand for a lasting settlement gradually turned into a set of proposals for far-reaching changes in England—especially for unity of religion with Scotland—and they did not achieve this, nor did they get the ‘incendiaries’ punished (a lower priority for them). Nor did they obtain free trade between Scotland and England—a demand added to their original ones. Eventually ratified by both sides in July and August, the treaty was thus a genuine compromise between differing interests. Following it, the army occupying Newcastle returned to Scotland in August, most of it being then disbanded. Charles himself continued his wooing of the Covenanters in April by announcing a visit to Scotland in person; he eventually arrived in August and stayed until October. The most optimistic scenario for the king’s visit was that he would persuade the Covenanters to support him in overthrowing the English parliament, since they had seen in the Treaty of London that English parliamentarians, even radical ones, did not share the whole of the Covenanters’ religious agenda. This was unlikely, of course, and it did not happen. What was slightly more likely was that the visit would win some friends

54   The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644 in Scotland, and that this would split the Covenanters or at least distract them from further interference in England. Charles already envisaged civil war in England, and it was imperative for him to prevent the Covenanters’ military machine from swinging into action on parliament’s side. During this visit, Charles made some of the concessions that he had not made in the Treaty of London. His first task was to attend a parliament that was ostentatiously stagemanaged by the Covenanters. Particularly damaging for royal power was the introduction of parliamentary control over appointments of officers of state, privy councillors, and judges in the court of session. Charles argued against this for a month but had to give in. His bargaining strength was further weakened by a plot among royalist army officers to arrest the leading Covenanters; the ‘Incident’, as it became known when discovered in October, made it harder for moderate Covenanters to trust the king. In October, news arrived of the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland. One of the few things on which king and Covenanters agreed was that a Scottish army should be sent to counter the rebellion and to defend the Anglo-Scottish ‘plantation’ in Ulster. Negotiations took until July 1642, partly because the English parliament was involved as well as the king, but the Covenanters eventually sent an army to Ulster, and the English parliament agreed to pay for it. The fortunes of the Scottish Revolution now depended on Irish developments as well as English ones.

The Solemn League and Covenant By virtually surrendering Scotland to the Covenanters, Charles had hoped to avoid provoking them to throw in their lot with the English parliament. With the outbreak of the English Civil War in August 1642, his strategy may have seemed successful; the Covenanters busied themselves with their Ulster army but did not seek to intervene in England. However, after the battle of Edgehill (23 October), the English parliament began to feel more need of Scottish help. They sent an agent to Scotland in November, setting off a long and complex Scottish debate. With hindsight, the logic of the Covenanters’ actions is clear: if they let the king win in England, he would attack them next. But the Covenanters had been so successful that this was less clear at the time; the king’s friends could argue that he had accepted their revolution in 1641. Moreover, the terms of any intervention remained to be discussed. The 1641 settlement had done one thing for Scottish royalists: it had revived the privy council, with leading Covenanters being given positions on it. However, Hamilton and several of his friends were also on the council, and Hamilton now used his position to play a series of delaying cards. In January 1643, he and Traquair organized the so-called ‘Cross Petition’, professing to support the National Covenant but opposing intervention in England. This gathered enough support to distract the Covenanters for some time. Hamilton was constructing a group of moderate Covenanters satisfied with the 1641

julian Goodare   55 settlement and moderate royalists prepared to acquiesce in that settlement, excluding more notorious royalists like Huntly. However, Hamilton had too few supporters to sustain this effort for long. Eventually, on 12 May, the Covenanters summoned a convention of estates—a parliament in almost all but name, and with the advantage of assembling quickly. It met on 22 June. In between these two dates, Hamilton’s coalition-building efforts were blown away by the revelation of the Antrim Plot, a scheme to invade Scotland from Antrim’s Irish estates. Hamilton’s manoeuvres had had some success, and he may even have stopped the Covenanters sending an army into England in the autumn of 1643, but he could do no more than delay the inevitable. The convention made clear within days that it was ready to negotiate a treaty with the English parliament. Negotiations began then in earnest, and took until August. The English had seen in the Treaty of London that the Scots had ideas about how to reform England. Some of these ideas were welcome—the Scottish army in Newcastle had purged the notorious Arminian decorations from Durham Cathedral—but others were, at best, divisive within England—not all the English wanted to abolish episcopacy. However, that was not the Scots’ problem at this stage. The main part of the treaty that emerged was called the Solemn League and Covenant. This took the form of a declaration by the citizens of England, Scotland, and Ireland. They would preserve the church of Scotland, and reform the churches of England and Ireland ‘according to the Word of God, and the example of the best reformed Churches’ (this example was understood to mean Scotland). This reform would include the abolition of episcopacy. They would uphold the ‘rights and privileges of the Parliaments, and the liberties of the kingdoms’, and ‘preserve and defend the King’s Majesty’s person and authority’. Along with this declaration, which was adopted by the Scottish and English parliaments, the two parliaments made a military and financial agreement by which the Scots would send an army to England and the English parliament would pay for it. In a much-quoted phrase, Robert Baillie wrote: ‘The English were for a civill League, we for a religious Covenant.’16 This has often been used to explain why the Solemn League and Covenant failed (assuming we think that it did fail—but that is another question), the idea being that the two parties’ expectations differed. However, Baillie’s remark is more useful in focusing attention on their different needs. The English needed a Scottish army: the Scots needed guarantees that their army would be used to establish a congenial regime. Both sides understood this. The ‘civill League’ provided the army: the ‘religious Covenant’ provided the necessary ideological guarantees. The Solemn League and Covenant was a compromise, partly between different English interests, but not an unworkable one. In September 1643, the Covenanters sent a Scottish garrison to Berwick, the first instalment of their military assistance to the English parliament. Meanwhile, the royalists were in disarray. Hamilton and other royalists met at Kelso but decided that prospects for an uprising were hopeless. Hamilton himself, and his brother the earl of Lanark, returned to England in December, only for the king to arrest them for insufficient zeal

56   The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644 in the royal cause. Lanark soon escaped—and would spend the next two years working for the Covenanters. The Solemn League and Covenant was thus almost as consensual, at least in Scotland, as the National Covenant. It did not divide the politicians into two camps, in the way that (for instance) the Grand Remonstrance of 1641 had done in England. When the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant finally crossed the border into England in January 1644, its march had the support of most politically active Scots.

Conclusions An assessment of the Scottish Revolution may begin with the problem of allegiance. This in turn raises a second problem: there has been little attempt to understand royalist allegiance. There have been numerous works explaining the Covenanters, beginning with the unsurpassed narrative of David Stevenson;17 but these have usually taken royalist failure for granted. An analysis of royalist failure may in fact shed light on covenanting success also. Scottish royalists seem largely to have been nobles of one kind or another.18 This impression may be modified by future research, but those lower down the social scale—lairds and especially burgesses—seem more generally to have been committed Covenanters.19 Since lairds were landlords with similar interests to nobles, the greater royalism of the latter may be explicable through their closer connections with the royal court.20 Royalist nobles displayed a range of attitudes. Hamilton, the moderate coalitionbuilder, has received more attention than some.21 Along with him, Traquair was essentially a fixer rather than an ideologue. Huntly was the magnate of the north-east, which used to be seen as a ‘royalist’ area—but the north-east was divided, in the manner of most English counties, so that Huntly could never control it outright.22 And Hamilton and Huntly were not the only kinds of royalist. We should pay more attention to people like Nithsdale, a Catholic courtier who had risen to favour as an associate of Buckingham. He regularly urged drastic action against the Covenanters, and, as we have seen, first conceived the strategy of the Bishops’ Wars. These various ‘royalists’ could hardly ever work together. Royalist disunity was exacerbated by the defection to the king of the earl of Montrose, a flamboyant early covenanter who became an open royalist by at least 1642. Unlike Nithsdale, whose Catholicism put him firmly at odds with the Covenanters’ religious stance, Montrose always insisted that he accepted the National Covenant and opposed episcopacy. Nevertheless he became a militant royalist, arguing constantly against Hamilton’s serpentine dealings. When the Hamiltons were arrested in December 1643, it was at Montrose’s prompting.23 By early 1644, the future of Scottish royalism lay with Montrose—not that this was much of a future. Royalist problems in Scotland can partly be explained by the exigencies of royalist strategy. The king was usually either attacking Scotland from outside—in 1639 and

julian Goodare   57 1640—or conciliating the Covenanters—in 1638, and again from September 1640 to June 1643, when his wish to re-establish control of England took priority over his aims for Scotland. Attacking Scotland from outside made it difficult to provide leadership for indigenous royalists. Conciliating the Covenanters was never more than a temporary objective, but it usually took precedence over rallying royalists. Hamilton’s efforts at coalition-building were hampered by the fact (of which he was well aware) that such a coalition was rarely more than a plan B. He could not rally royalists openly, because it was imperative not to provoke the Covenanters. Royalist disunity contrasts strongly with covenanting unity. The Covenanters formed a successful coalition, with moderates like the earl of Dunfermline (a gentleman of the royal bedchamber) able to work with radicals like Balmerino or Wariston. The unity of the coalition held, from its beginnings in 1637, into 1644 and beyond. A commitment to presbyterianism, coupled with a commitment to parliamentary government, underpinned the movement’s unity; the movement could also accommodate sectional interests like the burghs’ wish for congenial commercial policies. Much of the foregoing analysis has been influenced by a ‘three kingdoms’ perspective. However, if not used with care, ‘three kingdoms’ analysis tends to divide the participants into ‘the Scots’, ‘the English’, and ‘the Irish’. Yet some Scots had more in common with some English (for instance) than they did with other Scots. And the agendas that they pursued were rarely simply national. The Covenanters’ English and Irish policies were not ‘foreign’ policies, but extensions of their aims at home. An understanding of the Covenanters’ English strategy, in particular, depends on a realization that not all of their programme was equally urgent; they could be flexible about some of it. They had a broad international vision. The final clause of the Solemn League and Covenant envisaged that other godly nations might join it—perhaps the United Netherlands or Sweden—and that it might be a means to aid other oppressed Protestants—Baillie mentioned concern for ‘the Bohemians and Palatines’.24 These matters were important, but they could wait. In 1644, the Covenanters’ hopes were high, and it remained to be seen how much of their broader programme they could achieve.

Notes 1. Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 2nd ser., VI, 483–4, 509; Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall, Diary, 1633–1645, ed. Thomas Thomson (Bannatyne Club, 1843), 64. 2. James Gordon, History of Scots Affairs, 1637–1641, 3 vols., ed. Joseph Robertson and George Grub (Spalding Club, 1841), I, 81. 3. Edward J. Cowan, ‘The Making of the National Covenant’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh, 1990), 68–89, at 78–82. 4. Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, Diary, 1632–1639, ed. George M. Paul (Scottish History Society, 1911), 318. 5. David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644:  The Triumph of the Covenanters (Newton Abbot, 1973; reprinted Edinburgh, 2003), 251. 6. Aberdeen Council Letters, II (1634–1644), ed. Louise B. Taylor (Oxford, 1950), 140–8. All quotations are from this passage.

58   The Rise of the Covenanters, 1637–1644 7. Wariston, Diary, 275. 8. Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King:  Charles I  and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 1990), 71. 9. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 100. 10. Wariston, Diary, 361; [Archibald Johnstone of Wariston,] An Information to All Good Christians Within the Kingdome of England (Edinburgh, 1639; STC (2nd edn.) 21905). 11. Donald, Uncounselled King, 131. 12. Laura A. M. Stewart, ‘Fiscal Revolution and State Formation in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, Historical Research, 84 (2011): 443–69. 13. Steve Murdoch, ‘Scotland, Scandinavia and the Bishops’ Wars, 1638–40’, in Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours (Dublin, 2002), 113–34. 14. James K. Cameron, ‘The Swiss and the Covenant’, in G. W. S. Barrow (ed.), The Scottish Tradition (Edinburgh, 1974), 155–63. 15. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 147. 16. Robert Baillie, Letters and Journals, 1637–1662, 3 vols., ed. David Laing (Bannatyne Club, 1841–2), II, 90. 17. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution. For recent overviews see David Stevenson, ‘Charles I, the Covenants and Cromwell, 1625–1660’, in Bob Harris and Alan R. MacDonald (eds.), Scotland: The Making and Unmaking of the Nation, c.1100–1707, vol. II: Early Modern Scotland, c.1500–1707 (Dundee, 2007), 36–55; Julian Goodare, ‘The Scottish Revolution’, in Sharon Adams and Julian Goodare (eds.), Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions (Woodbridge, 2014), 79–96; Allan I. Macinnes, ‘The “Scottish Moment”, 1638–1645’, in J. S. A. Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–1649 (Basingstoke, 2009), 125–52. 18. Keith M. Brown, ‘Courtiers and Cavaliers: Service, Anglicization and Loyalty among the Royalist Nobility’, in Morrill (ed.), Scottish National Covenant, 155–192. 19. John R. Young, ‘The Scottish Parliament and the Covenanting Revolution: The Emergence of a Scottish Commons’, in John R. Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 1997), 164–184; David Stevenson, ‘The Burghs and the Scottish Revolution’, in Michael Lynch (ed.), The Early Modern Town in Scotland (London, 1987), 167–91. 20. For a study making this point from allegiance in 1621 see Julian Goodare, ‘The Scottish Parliament of 1621’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995): 29–51. 21. John Scally, ‘Counsel in Crisis: James, Third Marquis of Hamilton and the Bishops’ Wars, 1638–1640’, in Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars, 18–34; Donald, Uncounselled King, chap. 3. 22. Barry Robertson, ‘The Covenanting North of Scotland, 1638–1647’, Innes Review, 61 (2010): 24–51. 23. Edward J. Cowan, Montrose: For Covenant and King (London, 1977), 144. 24. Baillie, Letters and Journals, II, 82.

Further Reading Adams, Sharon and Julian Goodare (eds.), Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions (Woodbridge, 2014). Cowan, Edward J., Montrose: For Covenant and King (London, 1977).

julian Goodare   59 Donald, Peter, An Uncounselled King:  Charles I  and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 1990). Furgol, Edward M., A Regimental History of the Covenanting Armies, 1639–1651 (Edinburgh, 1990). Goodare, Julian, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1999). Lee, Maurice, The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1635–1637 (Urbana, IL, 1985). Macinnes, Allan I., The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, c.1607–1661 (Edinburgh, 2011). Macinnes, Allan I., ‘The ‘Scottish Moment’, 1638–1645’, in J. S. A. Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–1649 (Basingstoke, 2009), 125–152. Makey, Walter, The Church of the Covenant, 1637–1651 (Edinburgh, 1979). Morrill, John (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh, 1990). Stevenson, David, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates (Belfast, 1981). Stevenson, David, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters (Newton Abbot, 1973; reprinted Edinburgh, 2003). Stevenson, David, Union, Revolution, and Religion in 17th-Century Scotland (Aldershot, 1997). Stewart, Laura A. M., ‘Fiscal Revolution and State Formation in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, Historical Research, 84 (2011): 443–469. Stewart, Laura A.  M., Urban Politics and the British Civil Wars:  Edinburgh, 1617–1653 (Leiden, 2006). Young, John R., The Scottish Parliament, 1639–1661:  A  Political and Constitutional Analysis (Edinburgh, 1996).

Chapter 4

The C oll apse of Roya l P ower in Eng l a nd, 163 7– 1 64 2 Richard Cust

England in 1637 England in 1637 did not look like a country which was on the brink of civil war.1 It had a settled, well-established monarchical regime and, in contrast to much of continental Europe which was blighted by the Thirty Years War, it appeared to be an oasis of peace and order. The nation had been involved in the war between 1624 and 1629, and this brought with it all the expense and disruption that wars at this time incurred, particularly those which were unsuccessful. But in 1629 Charles had signed peace treaties with France and Spain, and since then had stuck steadfastly to a policy of peace, in spite of continuing pressures to re-enter the war on the Protestant side. With peace had come the end of parliaments. At first this appeared to be an interim measure, as the crown sought to defuse the political opposition and popular discontents which had surfaced in the House of Commons in 1629. But gradually the king’s determination not to summon another parliament until it could be demonstrated that the ‘ill affected spirits’ had been removed hardened into a settled conviction that he was better advised to rule without it. Ministers became wary of raising the possibility lest they antagonize him. Lord Keeper Coventry who was unwise enough to do so in 1633 was said to have been ‘so rattled’ by Charles ‘that he is now the most pliable man in England and all thoughts of parliament are quite out of his pate’.2 At a time when summoning and dissolving parliaments was entirely at royal discretion there seemed to be little prospect that another one would meet in Charles I’s lifetime. The Personal Rule had already lasted for eight years and it appeared unlikely that it would end any time soon. The policies adopted by the crown during the Personal Rule were often unpopular but not to the point where they seemed likely to bring about the collapse of royal

richard Cust   61 government. As Conrad Russell has remarked, the State Papers Domestic, which collected together much of the government’s correspondence, is ‘not the record of a regime which was sitting on a powder keg’.3 There is evidence of foot-dragging and discontent over government directives, and exasperation at the unwillingness of puritans to comply with Laudian reforms in the church; but, in general, it gives the appearance of a government in relatively good working order. The collection of ship money, the most contentious tax of the period, is a case in point. It provoked a good deal of grumbling and discontent, but most of this was focused, ostensibly, on the ways in which the tax was rated at a local level. Few were prepared to express open opposition to the principle of the king collecting a tax without the consent of parliament, at least before the split judgment in Hampden’s case, early in 1638, made such expressions more acceptable. However, even after this, over 90% of the money assessed was still eventually collected, a success rate which compared very favourably with most early modern taxes.4 The willingness of local gentry to continue to cooperate with the privy council in keeping the wheels of government turning was epitomized in the appointment of Oliver Cromwell as a justice of the peace for the Isle of Ely in 1638.5 Cromwell was a puritan and no lover of the crown’s policies; but he acknowledged that in the interests of order and stability it was important for gentlemen to cooperate in the processes of government, and that in doing so they gained a good deal in terms of personal honour and reputation. In matters of religion and the church there was always much greater potential for the open expression of opposition because many puritans saw it as an article of faith that they should speak out against policies which they considered ‘popish’ and ungodly. There was plenty for them to protest against. From the late 1620s, Charles, in alliance with Archbishop Laud and a group of anti-Calvinist bishops, had been reforming the Church of England to remove Calvinist and puritan practices and steer it in a high-church, ‘Anglican’, direction. The afternoon sermons and lectures favoured by the godly had come under attack; puritan Sabbath observance had been challenged by the Book of Sports; St Paul’s and other cathedral churches had been refurbished to emphasize ‘the Beauty of Holiness’; and by 1637, in many dioceses, communion tables were being moved to the east end of parish churches and railed off to emphasize the authority of priesthood and the importance of sacramental religion. There was plenty of opposition to these measures, but it was fragmented and disorganized and the regime was generally able to silence it with harsh, well-publicized punishments. By 1637 some puritans were beginning to despair altogether of changing the direction of policy and contemplating emigration to the more congenial religious surroundings of New England. These included peers like Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke, whose readiness to give up their estates and political power in England was a measure of their alienation from the regime.6 The systematic opposition to many of the government’s policies mounted by individuals like Saye and Brooke demonstrated that the appearance of general acquiescence in the Personal Rule was deceptive. Where it is possible to eavesdrop on the private thoughts and opinions of contemporaries, in a source like the diary of the puritan steward of Northampton, Robert Woodford, there is plenty of evidence that support for

62   The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642 the regime was already being hollowed out. Woodford was particularly alarmed by the Laudian altar policy which he saw as the symptom of a spiritual malaise which threatened to bring God’s providential judgements down upon the nation. He was also beginning to harbour even more damaging doubts as to whether the king, surrounded by Laudian bishops and ‘evil counsellors’, was still firm in his commitment to the Protestant religion.7 Others were similarly apprehensive of the influence of Charles’s Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria, and popish advisers at court, of the failure to re-enter the Thirty Years War in support of the Protestant cause and of the disregard of traditional ‘liberties’ and the rule of law. Above all there was a general desire for a meeting of parliament, which could give voice to these discontents and carry out its traditional role of counselling the king and securing the redress of grievances. However, while Charles persisted in his determination to rule without it, there was little that could be done. Most Englishmen regarded a parliament as the only legitimate forum for expressing open discontent with the crown’s policies. Anything else risked being construed as resistance or rebellion which they had been brought up to believe was a sin against God and the ultimate danger to the settled monarchical government which was the main guarantor of order and stability. Without a parliament it would be very hard for opposition to find a focus or secure general acceptance.

The Prayer Book Rebellion and the Bishops’ Wars What transformed the situation was not events in England, but in Scotland. It was the Covenanter rebellion in 1638, prompted by the introduction of an English-style Prayer Book which ultimately left Charles I with no alternative but to summon parliament and bring to an end his Personal Rule. The origins and course of the Scottish rebellion have been discussed in Julian Goodare’s essay in this volume. Here it is worth evaluating the contribution made to the crisis by Charles’s own mistakes and political misjudgements, which were to be recurring themes in the events leading to the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642. The formal introduction of a new English-style Prayer Book in Scotland in July 1637, on the advice of Archbishop Laud and the Scottish bishops, took place against a background of widespread alienation from Charles’s rule and led to bitter protests. But the king’s own interventions made the situation considerably worse. His refusal to acknowledge that there was anything in the Prayer Book that was contrary to ‘true religion’ hamstrung the efforts of his Scottish councillors to broker a compromise; while his determination to see Scottish resistance as a humiliating rejection of his monarchical authority—on one occasion telling his chief Scottish adviser the marquis of Hamilton that while the National Covenant was in force ‘I have no more power in Scotland than a duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer’—raised the stakes to the point at

richard Cust   63 which armed conflict became almost inevitable. The impact of his political incompetence was, perhaps, best summed up in the proclamation he issued in February 1638, declaring that he, and not his bishops or councillors, was responsible for the Prayer Book and that anyone who opposed it would be regarded as a traitor. This led directly to the signing of the National Covenant because it forced opponents of the Prayer Book to recognize that they were now challenging their monarch directly, and that for reasons of self-preservation they must attempt to unite the nation behind them. The consequence of Charles’s interventions, then, was to turn a limited protest into a full-blown rebellion.8 His management of the Bishops’ Wars was equally unsuccessful. The king lost his best chance of defeating the Scots when he was tricked out of giving them battle at Kelso on 4–5 June 1639. He probably had the larger and better-equipped army, but the Scots were able to bluff him into retreating by drawing up their forces in shallow formation, with extra sets of colours, to convince him that their force was much bigger than was actually the case.9 The Treaty of Berwick which followed gave the Scots time to organize themselves militarily and consolidate their support inside England with some astute appeals to public opinion. The most momentous political event in England at this time was the summoning of the Short Parliament in April 1640. This was a straightforward consequence of the king’s determination to continue the war against the Scots. Charles himself was still unenthusiastic about a parliament; but his councillors, including the earl of Strafford who was now in charge of the war effort, were adamant that this was the only way to raise the requisite funds and secure a political mandate to demonstrate that the nation was behind the war. However, the parliament completely failed to deliver. MPs came to Westminster determined to secure redress of grievances and if the crown was to secure supply it would have to make substantial concessions. But Charles stuck stubbornly to the view that, in the face of rebellion in his northern kingdom, his subjects were duty bound to assist him. The first two weeks of the assembly produced stalemate, as the Commons insisted on putting redress before supply and Charles tried to kick-start discussion of subsidies by introducing the supply motion in the House of Lords. It was not until early May that he came up with the concrete offer of concessions that MPs sought, a proposal for abandoning ship money in return for twelve subsidies. But this was too little too late. The Commons, egged on by a small group of MPs led by John Pym, who had been engaged in treasonable collaboration with the Scots, had gone past the point at which it was willing to compromise. Negotiations collapsed and the parliament was dissolved.10 The failure of the Short Parliament left the war effort against the Scots in disarray. The lack of funds and failure to secure a political mandate ensured that the English army which assembled in the north in August 1640 was divided and poorly equipped, with many of the pressed levies on the verge of mutiny. It succumbed to a better organized and more united Scottish force at the first taste of action, in the battle of Newburn on 28 August. The Scots then rapidly occupied Durham and Northumberland and at the Treaty of Ripon negotiated a payment of £850 a day to support their forces. With defeat in battle Charles had failed what was still regarded as the ultimate test of a monarch. Bereft of political support and with his finances in a state of collapse, he had little alternative but to summon the Long Parliament.

64   The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642

The Long Parliament and the Collapse of Royal Power in England Scottish victory in the Bishops Wars and the meeting of another parliament transformed English politics. The most significant change was that a rebellion had taken place against the monarch and had succeeded. This broke the taboo on armed resistance to the monarch which was one of the most significant constraints operating in favour of the status quo. The very fact of success destroyed the belief, assiduously cultivated by the Tudors, that rebellion always failed. Moreover the Scots had rebelled in the name of religion and conscience and had apparently met with divine approval for their actions. All this served to promote armed resistance as a legitimate response to dealing with a tyrannical ruler thus opening up a whole range of new political possibilities. The other critical consequence of the Scots victory was to provide the king’s opponents with a coercive power which they had previously lacked. Since the decline of baronial affinities in the early sixteenth century those who sought to challenge royal policy had not possessed the means to take on the monarch in armed conflict. They could put pressure on him by withholding supply and attacking his ministers in parliament, and they could bring influence to bear at court; but, in the last resort, they could not force him to do anything. This situation was changed by the presence of the Scots, in control of what was unquestionably the most potent military force in Britain and willing to use it to promote the interests of their English allies. In the short term this deprived Charles of the power to dissolve parliament at will which had long been one of the monarch’s greatest political assets. If he did not like the way things were developing in a parliament he could simply call off the game and start again. Often the mere threat of this was enough to curtail a parliament’s freedom of action. But now, with the Scots threatening to march south unless the king kept up payments of £850 a day, dissolution was no longer an option.11 In the longer term the Scots army guaranteed the security of their English allies and gave them the room to manoeuvre for a settlement on their terms. This group, which soon became known as ‘the Junto’, had come to the fore in the immediate aftermath of the Bishops Wars when they sponsored the Twelve Peers Petition which condemned the policies of the 1630s and called for a parliament to remedy the nation’s ills. Led by Pym in the Commons and his allies Saye and Brooke, and the earls of Bedford, Essex, and Warwick in the Lords, this became the most dynamic force in English politics over the following months. Their collusion with the Scots during 1639 and 1640 left them wide open to a charge of treason and there was every likelihood that if Charles could turn the tables he would move against them. This forced them into a high-stakes political game in which they sought to impose a political settlement which would guarantee their personal security. In the terminology used by John Adamson in his ground-breaking study of ‘the Noble Revolt’, they sought to ‘Venetianize’ the king by removing his power to appoint councillors, to summon or dissolve parliament, or to veto legislation. They also

richard Cust   65 sought to bring about radical reform in the church by removing the bishops, partly to appease their Scots allies who blamed bishops for the Prayer Book and partly to promote their own puritan agenda. Charles was never likely to accept such reforms willingly, as his bitter observations on the authority of a ‘duke of Venice’ indicated. But the Junto could not afford to back down and over the following months national politics revolved around the struggle to make their settlement stick.12 In these circumstances, the options open to Charles were extremely limited. His one major asset was that he could not be removed. The Junto would probably have liked to depose him had this been feasible; but there was no obvious candidate to replace him which meant that any final solution to the crisis would have to involve the king which gave him the power of veto over its terms.13 In other respects, however, his position was very weak. His loss of military power and the power to dissolve parliament left him with only two serious possibilities if he wanted to regain the political initiative. The first of these was to mount some sort of coup against the parliamentary leadership. This certainly appealed to him. He had few qualms about using force in dealing with those he regarded as traitors and rebels; and his whole analysis of the crisis was posited on the assumption that the ‘multitude’ had been led astray by a few ‘malignant spirits’ whose removal would herald a return to normality. In practical terms it was also viable. If he could secure control of the Tower of London this would give him command of London, and he still had the remnants of an army in the north. As we shall see, he was tempted to try this option on more than one occasion during the Long Parliament. The alternative was to endeavour to divide his enemies and build his own royal party. With most of the political nation united against the Scots war and the policies of the Personal Rule this may not have looked viable in late 1640. But once the Junto started to implement their reforms there was always the likelihood of a royalist backlash. The Great Council of Peers which had met at York in September–October 1640 to negotiate a way out of the Scottish crisis had revealed that a majority of noblemen felt some sympathy for Charles’s plight and were determined to maintain the traditional status quo. Any measures to unduly restrict the royal prerogative or interfere with the structures of the Church of England were likely to meet with their disapproval. The other main element in the political equation, public opinion and the engagement of the gentry and middling sort, was similarly volatile. For the time being they were united in favour of reform and backed the Junto’s agenda to the hilt. But as the implications of this started to become apparent, particularly with the upsurge in radical puritanism, divisions would inevitably emerge. There was fertile ground, then, on which Charles could build a royalist party. However, this would require a degree of political skill, restraint, and judgement on his part that during the Scottish crisis had been singularly lacking.14 The story of the collapse of royal power in England up to the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1642 was largely the story of the struggle between the king and his opponents in the Junto to make their version of a political settlement stick. Both sought to draw on the support of wider constituencies: the peers in the House of Lords, Commons MPs and the wider publics of local gentry and the politically informed middling sort, and, indeed, the Scots who from the spring of 1641 also started to divide. For much of the

66   The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642 time the peerage also sought to perform its traditional role of building bridges between crown and people. But the heart of the process was the contest between the crown and the Junto. During the early months of the Long Parliament, up to March 1641, the Junto and their Scots allies were clearly in the ascendancy. After a failed attempt at a coup against the Junto leadership in late November, as a result of which Charles’s most forceful counsellor, the earl of Strafford, was imprisoned, the king was pushed to the margins of the political process. Negotiations went ahead for a full-scale peace treaty with the Scots and work began on dismantling the machinery of the personal rule and bringing its leading architects to account. By mid-January 1641 it appeared that, with the encouragement of his moderate councillors, Charles himself had been co-opted to the process of reform. It was reported at court that he was ‘brought to a dislike of those counsels that he hath formerly followed and therefore resolves to steer another course’. Bedford and Saye were appointed to the privy council and there were strong rumours that Pym would take over the crucial financial post of chancellor of the exchequer. The king also gave his blessing to the Triennial Act which prevented a re-run of the Personal Rule by guaranteeing that a parliament would be summoned at least once every three years. As a quid pro quo negotiations began with the Junto over providing the crown with an adequate basis for the royal finances and achieving a compromise over Strafford. All this appeared to hold out the prospect of settlement on terms that were just about acceptable to Charles. But from late February this began to recede as he began looking for opportunities to reassert his authority.15 The first signs began to emerge publicly of the long-anticipated resentment at the Scots occupation of the northern counties and both within parliament and at a local level there was growing opposition to the ‘root and branch’ reform of episcopacy. But the major preoccupation of the king at this time was to try to save Strafford. His impeachment was effectively putting on trial the policies of the Personal Rule. The Commons’ charges against him were drawn up in such a way that if they could be made to stick this would provide a powerful demonstration that the authoritarian politics that he symbolized was no longer permissible. Charles could have taken much of the force out of their attack by making concessions and going along with a compromise scheme to simply strip him of his offices; but this was something he deliberately chose not to do. He was determined that the earl should face down his accusers and vindicate the crown’s policies. In late February he appeared in the Lords when the charges were being read and delivered his opinion that in most respects there was no case to answer; and when the trial opened in March Strafford presented a robust and effective defence of his actions. As a result, the Junto leadership introduced a bill of attainder which declared that Strafford was guilty as charged and therefore liable to execution for treason. This high-handed procedure did not command universal support. Several MPs and peers were alarmed about the morality of a measure which was tantamount to judicial murder, and the indications were that it would fail to pass through the Lords who had already expressed misgivings about the strength of the Commons’ case. There was also growing alarm about the threat from the ‘popular multitude’ as crowds of Londoners, encouraged by Pym and the Junto

richard Cust   67 leadership, gathered around the parliament house and intimidated MPs and peers with calls for the earl’s execution. By the end of April the nascent royalist party was growing in strength and the balance of political advantage appeared to be tilting towards the king. At the start of May, however, Charles’s party-building strategy was blown apart by revelations about the Army Plot.16 The plot initially involved the king’s northern army marching on London, seizing the Tower, releasing Strafford and then dissolving parliament. When the army officers refused to countenance this, Sir John Suckling, the courtier-poet, went ahead and recruited a band of mercenaries who attempted to occupy the Tower on 3 May. Charles kept his distance from the detailed planning, but there is little doubt that he gave the plot his blessing and regarded it as a legitimate response to the traitorous activities of his enemies. The effect of the plot was to destroy completely the political advantage that had been accruing to him during March and April. Revelations about the attempt to seize the Tower, and other details of the plot, created a frenetic atmosphere in parliament and led to the passage of several measures which severely damaged the king’s chances of reimposing his authority. The Commons thrashed around for ways of expressing their abhorrence and safeguarding themselves against a coup, and came up with the Protestation. This was an oath of association which bound those who took it to defend king, parliament, the Protestant religion, and laws and liberties ‘against all popery and popish innovations’. In the coming months it was to be a powerful device for rallying support for parliament. During the same period the Commons also passed a bill providing that the existing parliament should not be dissolved without its own consent which was to severely restrict the king’s freedom of action. The Lords, recognizing that in this crisis Charles could not be relied on to act responsibly, went even further and for a few days effectively took over the reins of government, issuing a proclamation to arrest the plotters, calling out the militia and asking him to change various lord lieutenancies. One can see in this the furtherance of the process of taking authority out of the king’s hands and securing control over his appointment of officers. But in the short term the most important effect was to sweep away the king’s moderate support and seal Strafford’s fate. The bill of attainder reached the Lords on 4 May, the day after the revelations about the plot and the passage of the Protestation oath. This served to frighten off much of the earl’s potential support and the bill passed its third reading, leaving Charles to face an agonizing decision over signing the earl’s death warrant.17 The Army Plot and the events of early May 1641 marked an important watershed in relations between the king and the Junto. They demonstrated clearly that the king could not be trusted to abide by the undertakings that he gave and confirmed the Junto leadership in their belief that their only hope of security was to complete the process of ‘Venetianization’. They had made a start on this by eliminating the counsellor who posed the biggest threat to their survival, removing the king’s power to summon and dissolve parliament, interfering with his choice of crown officers, and temporarily taking control of the executive. Over the following months these intrusions into the royal prerogative became more pronounced as they recognized the urgency of removing Charles’s power to do them harm. On the king’s part, the feeling that he had been

68   The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642 coerced, against his conscience, into agreeing to Strafford’s execution increased his bitterness towards his enemies. To his resentment at the way in which he was steadily being stripped of his authority was added a sense that to make further concessions which went against God’s wishes could only bring down divine disapproval. On top of this, the death of the earl of Bedford in May removed the Junto leader best equipped to negotiate a compromise between the two sides and divisions over Strafford’s attainder had begun to break up the consensus and determination to seek the political middle ground that had largely prevailed in the House of Lords. National politics was becoming markedly more polarized.18 The two sides spent the summer months of 1641 jockeying for position and building up support. The Junto pressed on with reform and exploited further revelations about army plotting to press the king to remove ‘evil counsellors’. In other respects, however, they were on the defensive. The Scots finally decided to end their occupation which removed their most effective means of coercing the king. They also began to experience the unpopularity which went with exercising power. The abolition of episcopacy was encountering wide resistance; the poll tax to pay for the disbandment of the two armies was generally resented; and stories began to circulate about the ambition and arrogance of the Junto leadership, with the epithet ‘King Pym’ entering general usage by the autumn. Out of this, Charles made considerable headway in building a royalist party. He took a bold decision to travel to Scotland in August 1641, ostensibly to oversee the completion of the treaty with the Scots, but also to exploit the divisions emerging in the Covenanter ranks to build support north of the border. An increasingly vocal and effective royalist party was emerging in the Commons, not yet large enough to command a majority, but able to restrict the Junto’s freedom of action and subject its policies to searching criticism. His strongest support, however, was in the Lords where resistance to the exclusion of bishops was combined with a sense of the need to preserve the royal prerogative in order to maintain the traditional constitutional balance. From October onwards a discernible loyalist party voted en bloc to stymie further Junto moves towards reform. Charles himself was also successful in presenting a moderate front, and for many in the country it had come to seem that, whatever his faults, at least he stood for the maintenance of the status quo.19 At the time of the king’s return from Scotland, on 25 November 1641, the political balance appeared to be tilting once more in his favour. He had been damaged by his failure to respond positively to news of the Catholic Rebellion in Ireland in October. This revived fears of ‘popish plots’, particularly those associated with the queen; and it prompted proposals by the Junto to take control of the military force needed to suppress the rebellion. But in other respects his prospects appeared relatively encouraging. He had managed to use his majority in the Lords to block the Junto’s militia bill which would have deprived him of control of the army; and he was particularly effective at promoting himself as the main defender of a traditional, Jacobean style, Church of England. Moreover, if a proclamation instructing all absentee members of the Commons and the Lords to attend by 12 January 1642 produced results, there was the distinct possibility that he could command a majority in both houses and persuade them to dissolve

richard Cust   69 themselves.20 In late December, however, he threw away these advantages with a series of grotesque political misjudgements. The first of these was the decision to replace Sir William Balfour, the lieutenant of the Tower who had held out against the army plotters in May with a notoriously unscrupulous Catholic ‘swordsman’, Thomas Lunsford. This provoked demonstrations and protests on the streets of London, prompted the Commons to accuse two of his leading counsellors, Bristol and Digby, of treason and led to open talk of civil war, with the labels ‘cavalier’ and ‘roundhead’ being applied for the first time.21 Charles’s second mistake was to encourage a protest by the bishops. During the post-Christmas demonstrations Archbishop Williams had been jostled by a crowd of apprentices and this had frightened most of the other bishops into absenting themselves from the Lords. The peers responded by asking the Commons to join them in a declaration against riotous assemblies and, when they refused, to debate a motion by Digby, that because of the pressure from the mob the parliament was no longer free. At last there seemed a possibility of the adjournment that Charles had long been angling for. A resolution that parliament was acting under duress could be held to override the statute against dissolving without its own consent. On 28 December, however, the upper house voted by a bare majority that parliament was free and could continue sitting. At this point the king seriously overplayed his hand. Hoping to capitalize on the Lords’ alarm over the mob, he approved a protest drawn up by Williams in the name of twelve of the bishops declaring that since they could find neither ‘redress or protection’ from parliament all proceedings in their absence should be declared null and void. This would have invalidated the vote that parliament was free and reopened the possibility of adjournment. But when the Lords discussed it on the 30th they showed considerable irritation over the contradicting of their earlier vote and the Junto were able to push through a resolution that the protest entrenched on parliament’s fundamental privileges. Ten of the twelve bishops were incarcerated in the Tower and the number of the king’s natural supporters in the house significantly reduced.22 The mistakes over Lunsford and the bishops, however, were as nothing compared with the folly of the attempted coup against the Junto leadership. This was a policy that Charles had been considering on and off ever since Strafford had first suggested it in November 1640; however, the final decision to go ahead seems to have been taken suddenly on 1–2 January 1642. Apparently urged on by Digby and the queen, he was persuaded that the rejection of the bishops’ protest had been a temporary aberration and that, given a clear lead, the majority of the Lords would still be firmly behind him. Only this can explain the huge gamble of preferring treason charges. However, when the attorney general read out the charges in the upper house on 3 January, against five members of the Commons and Lord Mandeville, the peers showed themselves in no mood to countenance such naked political aggression. Instead of moving to examine witnesses, as Charles had anticipated, they appointed a committee to decide whether the charges were ‘a regular proceeding according to the law’ and voted to join the Commons in requesting an armed guard. The next day the king took the fateful decision to go in person with three hundred armed men to arrest the Five Members.23 The MPs were

70   The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642 forewarned and escaped by the river. Charles was left in the hugely embarrassing position of arriving at the Commons to demand their surrender only to find that they had already departed.24 The king’s actions in late December 1641 and early January 1642 provoked a reaction which lost him his capital. The Lords and Commons passed a series of resolutions which effectively gave military control of London to the parliament. The sheriff was empowered to raise a posse comitatus for parliament’s safety, and the city’s forces were put under the command of Sergeant Major Skippon, an ally of the Junto. There was also a widespread popular reaction against Charles as news of his actions spread. Huge crowds came out on to the streets to escort the Commons back to Westminster when they decided it was safe to return to their house, with the city bandsmen carrying copies of the Protestation stuck onto their pikes. By this stage the king had had enough. On the 10th he took his family and fled to Hampton Court, effectively surrendering control of London to his enemies. What had begun as an attempted coup ended as a counter coup against him.25

The Formation of an English Royalist Party These events were arguably the most critical of Charles’s reign. They ensured that civil war was now not just possible, but highly probable. Both sides had taken up positions from which it was very difficult to retreat and by withdrawing from London the king had physically separated them into two camps. The confrontations of the period had also introduced a crucial element of violence which made the final resort to armed force less unthinkable. If this had happened anywhere else the French ambassador observed, ‘la ville seroit a feu et sang dans 24 heures’. In England there was still the restraining influence of deeply rooted traditions of unity and legality; however, the leadership on both sides was getting close to the point of no return. As Conrad Russell has explained, Charles had effectively been deprived of his capital by a rebel insurrection and if he now ‘wanted civil war . . . he was only doing the obvious thing for a king in his position to do’.26 Meanwhile the Junto, having been publicly accused of treason, were unlikely to feel secure in any undertaking given by the person who had brought the charges. What held back the final confrontation at this stage was largely the king’s sense that he was not yet strong enough to win a civil war. The story of the following months was, in many respects, the story of how he was able to gather enough support to fight. Following his departure from London, Charles embarked on a dual strategy. In public he made every effort to present himself as moderate and accommodating. His chief adviser in this was Sir Edward Hyde who took on the role of chief draftsman for the spate of royal declarations that were published in the spring and summer of 1642. The tone of these was summed up in the advice that Hyde gave to Charles as he headed towards York

richard Cust   71 in March. The king must strive to quell rumours about ‘designs of immediate force’ and avoid ‘giving the least hint to your people that you rely upon any thing but the strength of your laws and their obedience’.27 On the other hand, behind the scenes, Charles was preparing for war. Egged on by Henrietta Maria, who by early 1642 had established herself as his most influential counsellor, he developed a plan to set up his court in York, take control of Hull as a base for recruiting a royalist army, start purchasing weapons in the Netherlands and finally coerce parliament into backing down and acknowledging obedience to their monarch. There seems little doubt that Charles favoured this more aggressive option. He was still profoundly resentful at the way in which the Junto were steadily stripping him of his royal authority and was convinced, as he told the Dutch ambassador, that no matter how much he conceded, his opponents would never be satisfied. Striking back against them seemed not only the most attractive, but also the most viable option. What held him back was lack of political allies.28 In the aftermath of his departure from London in January 1642 his main source of strength lay in the House of Lords. In spite of the removal of the bishops, there was still a royalist majority which was powerful enough to block the Junto’s efforts to take control of the militia or confirm the exclusion of bishops. Charles, with Bristol’s advice, made a number of conciliatory moves which bolstered his credentials as the main bulwark of the legal and constitutional status quo and helped to drive a wedge between Lords and Commons. On 28 January, the duke of Richmond attempted to exploit this by again proposing an adjournment of the parliament. But, as had happened a month earlier, this backfired disastrously. Richmond was fortunate to escape imprisonment and royalist peers found themselves pilloried in petitions and pamphlets as members of ‘the malignant party’. As intimidation increased from the crowds thronging round Westminster, their attendance in the Lords declined. During February the Junto were finally able to secure majority support for bishops’ exclusion and the passage of the Militia Ordinance. Charles had lost what influence he had had over proceedings in parliament.29 Nonetheless during the first half of 1642 it was the king who continued to make the political weather. It was his determination to secure the means to punish his opponents and his progressive withdrawal to the north which largely dictated the shape and pace of events. But it took two sides to fight a civil war and just as important was the attitude of the Junto leadership. Their strategy at this time was basically to prepare for war while giving every appearance of wishing to preserve the peace. Having been accused of treason, Pym and the other leaders recognized that their only security lay in emasculating Charles to a degree that he could not possibly find acceptable. This made any resolution of the conflict short of civil war highly improbable. However, if they did have to fight, the Junto needed to carry with them the bulk of the Commons and a substantial part of the political nation which, given the deeply ingrained traditions of non-resistance and the desire for peace, was never going to be easy. This was why Pym had to go on giving the appearance of seeking accommodation, while, as Russell puts it, trying to ‘needle the king into beginning a civil war himself ’.30 It was a difficult balancing act, but he largely carried it off, with Charles’s willing cooperation.

72   The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642 The king’s decision to head north seemed to confirm all the Junto’s dire warnings about his aggressive intent. Pym responded by pushing through the Commons a ‘declaration of fears and jealousies’ which raised the stakes by making an alarming reference to rumours of the king’s ‘great designs’ for ‘breaking the neck of your parliament’. The Junto also took further steps to mobilize its greatest asset, the level of popular support that parliament enjoyed in the country. There was a new round of parliament-sponsored subscription to the Protestation; petitioning from the shires was stepped up, often accompanied by parades of local support in London; and the first moves were made in getting parliament-appointed lord lieutenants to take control of the county militias.31 Charles, in the meantime, began the process of building enough support to fight a civil war. When he arrived at York in late March he was almost bereft of allies. The expected rally to him by the northern gentry did not materialize and his attendance consisted of two of his most loyal peers, Richmond and Newcastle, and a few household officers and guards. In default of any possibility of being able to take more aggressive action he fell back on Hyde’s advice and staked a claim to the political and moral high ground by presenting himself as the aggrieved party. His attempt to take Hull in April was an important part of this strategy. It was preceded by a series of pamphlet exchanges in which he accused parliament of usurping his right to appoint the town’s governor and contravening the Petition of Right by billeting soldiers there. He then conducted a series of elaborately theatrical negotiations with Governor Hotham in front of the town walls which were aimed as much at provoking his enemies as actually securing the town. When Hotham remained defiant he was able to brand him a traitor and insist that parliament’s defence of his actions amounted to ‘actual war levied against us’.32 The episode at Hull and parliament’s order to execute the Militia Ordinance gave the king considerable leverage as the paper war intensified in May. He now had a powerful case for arguing that defiance of his authority was tantamount to a rejection of the rule of law and the constitutional status quo; and his case was beginning to find support in the localities. The criticisms of the Junto leadership and puritan religious policy, which had surfaced intermittently during 1641, were coming together and were linked with a growing acceptance of the king’s portrayal of himself as the guardian of tradition. In Herefordshire a group of leading justices subscribed to an open letter which described the constitution as bound together by a ‘triple cord’, comprising king, Lords, and Commons: ‘Every one of the three has a negative voice and if any should have the power of binding it should be thought rather the king than the Commons.’33 The different strands of royalism were coalescing to provide a coherent platform for the formation of a royalist party. But until the king was able to gather a credible body of political and military support at York there was little prospect that he would actually be able to fight a civil war. In these circumstances, Charles demonstrated to the full his qualities as a party leader. He combined the personal conviction and determination needed to drive his cause forward, and rally committed royalists, with sufficient tactical awareness to reach out to the middle ground and reassure those who might be wavering in their loyalty. This enabled him to retrieve a situation in which most commentators saw him as simply too weak to mount an effective challenge to parliament.

richard Cust   73 The turning point came late in May 1642 when he finally managed to persuade a substantial number of peers to join him in the north. He did this by means of a personal summons to each of them, ‘on their allegiance’, to attend him at York to provide counsel concerning ‘affairs much importing the peace and good of the kingdom’. Peers had a very strong sense of their obligations of personal service to the king and, also, of their duty to counsel their monarch in time of need; so this was a summons that they found very hard to resist. By mid-June some forty of them had rallied to the king, considerably outnumbering those who remained at Westminster. His prospects were almost immediately transformed. Their presence gave his proceedings a political credibility that they had lacked before and provided a powerful focus for rallying political and military support. He was able to persuade the peers to sign an ‘Engagement’, pledging themselves to defend his person and ‘just and legal prerogative’, and explicitly rejecting the Militia Ordinance. These peers also began pledging money and backing for military action, initially with personal subscriptions to raise two thousand cavalry, then by accepting office under the royal Commissions of Array, which were Charles’s response to the Militia Ordinance. Parliament reacted by ordering their lord lieutenants to start mustering local troops and impeaching some of the peers who had joined the king.34 As both sides appeared to be gearing up for war, there was a widespread reaction in the country which found its most tangible expression in a series of county-wide petitions calling for settlement. This produced the final attempt to broker a peace. The driving force behind this came from a group of peers who assumed their traditional responsibility for building bridges between the king and his people. It took the form of the Nineteen Propositions which emerged out of a bi-partisan initiative led by Bristol and Northumberland. The original aim appears to have been ‘to set down all the things in difference between the king and the subject, with the most probable ways of reconciling them’. But the propositions which emerged from the Lords in late May were much less accommodating than originally intended, with the Junto-led committee taking as their guiding principles parliament’s right to dictate the king’s choice of councillors and the requirement that he accept the Militia Ordinance. In spite of the uncompromising tone of the Nineteen Propositions, the peers involved in the drafting believed that they would at least provide the opportunity to open a dialogue with the king, and there were plenty of peers at York prepared to urge this on him. However, Charles was unimpressed. In his published Answer to the XIX Propositions their effect was described as being to turn him into ‘but the outside, but the picture, but the sign of a king’, and this was something he would never agree to.35 The king’s answer was debated in the Commons in late June and there was considerable support from an emerging ‘peace party’ for toning down some of the original propositions. But such moves were soon overtaken by the escalating military preparations. As parliament stepped up the execution of the Militia Ordinance and began recruiting an army under the earl of Essex, Charles issued instructions to the Commissioners of Array and began raising his own force. The first clash took place in Leicestershire at the end of June when the royalist commissioner, Henry Hastings, was resisted in his attempt

74   The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642 to take control of the county magazine. The outbreak of actual fighting was still delayed, but by early July the civil war was to all intents and purposes under way.

Conclusion The collapse of royal authority to the point at which civil war broke out in 1642 was, at its core, a story about the power struggle between the king and the Junto. For Charles maintaining his authority as a monarch, and punishing those who sought to strip him of it, was very much a matter of personal honour, a test of his resolve and manhood, as his wife repeatedly told him. For the Junto anything short of a settlement which effectively ‘Venetianized’ the king under the direction of a parliamentary commonwealth would leave them exposed to treason charges as soon as he regained the initiative. Neither side felt that it could settle for anything less than what it regarded as clear-cut victory. This explains why efforts to broker a compromise in the summer of 1642, which had the support of the majority of the political nation, came to nothing. Ultimately neither of the main protagonists felt it could afford to allow this to happen. This is not to say, however, that it was politics at the centre which alone explains the outbreak of civil war. The combustible mix of circumstances which produced this outcome was rooted in a complex variety of structural faults and broader social, cultural, and political developments. The so-called ‘British problem’, created by the Stuart monarchy’s efforts to rule over England, Scotland, and Ireland, with their very divergent political and religious cultures, produced tensions which continually threatened to destabilize the government of all three kingdoms.36 The divided religious legacy of the Reformation led to conflict between ‘puritan’ and ‘Anglican’ visions of the true church, and a continuing fear of ‘popery’, which created spiritual antagonisms over which many contemporaries felt they could not afford to compromise. And the emergence of a ‘public sphere’ of politics in which broad swathes of the gentry and middling sort became engaged in political debate and controversy created constituencies to which both the main protagonists continually sought to pitch their appeals and, ultimately, provided them with the means to fight the war.37 These factors and others—such as the contingencies which produced a rebellion in Ireland in October 1641 and stoked up fears of ‘popery’ in England—created the context in which civil war became possible after 1637. However, in the final analysis, it was the clash of the main political actors which turned potential into reality. And—because in early modern monarchical states it was kings who largely made the political running—the course of events was shaped, above all, by Charles. It was his crass handling of the Scottish crisis which turned local protest into full-blown, and successful, rebellion; his determination not to agree terms which he saw as personally humiliating which stymied efforts at settlement; and his repeated attempts to resolve his problems by a dramatic coup, rather than patiently building political support, which handed the initiative back to his opponents when he appeared to be gaining

richard Cust   75 the upper hand. Charles’s mistakes and misjudgements brought royal authority almost to the point of collapse after he abandoned London in January 1642. However, had he simply been incompetent he would never have been able to rally sufficient support to fight a civil war. In the end it was his capacity and resolve as a party leader, demonstrated most clearly in the way he retrieved an apparently hopeless situation to form a credible royalist party in May and June, that finally ignited the conflict. At the end of his masterly analysis of the causes of the civil war, Conrad Russell concluded that while these were complex and multifarious, without Charles a civil war is ‘almost impossible to imagine’.38 This is a verdict that it is hard to dispute.

Notes 1. For an assessment of England in 1637, see Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), chap.1. 2. The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches, ed. W. Knowler, 2 vols. (1729), I, 141. 3. Russell, Fall, 1. 4. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (London, 1992), 587–8. 5. Russell, Fall, 2. 6. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, 2005), 133–47; Ann Hughes, ‘Robert Greville, Second Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court (1607–1643)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). 7. John Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637–1641’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988): 769–88. 8. David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644:  The Triumph of the Covenanters (Newton Abbot, 1973; reprinted Edinburgh, 2003), chap. 2; Cust, Charles I, 210–43. 9. John Adamson, ‘England without Cromwell: What if Charles I had Avoided the Civil War?’, in Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London, 1997), 95–101. 10. Russell, Fall, 90–123; Clive Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980), 138. 11. Conrad Russell, ‘The Scottish Party in English Parliaments, 1640–2 or the Myth of the English Revolution’, Historical Research, 66 (1993): 39. 12. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007). 13. Russell, Fall, 279. 14. Cust, Charles I, 262–73. 15. Adamson, Noble Revolt, chaps. 3–6; Cust, Charles I, 274–7. 16. Cust, Charles I, 277–83. 17. Conrad Russell, ‘The First Army Plot of 1641’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 38 (1988): 85–106; Russell, Fall, 296–7. 18. Adamson, Noble Revolt, chaps. 10–12; Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and Providence’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds.), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, 2006), 195–9. 19. Adamson, Noble Revolt, chaps. 13–14; Richard Cust, Charles I and the English Aristocracy, 1625–1642 (Cambridge, 2013), chap. 5, pt. II. 20. Adamson, Noble Revolt, chap. 15; Cust, Charles I, 310–17. 21. Cust, Charles I, 317–18; Russell, Fall, 439–41; Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981), 171–3, 176.

76   The Collapse of Royal Power in England, 1637–1642 Russell, Fall, 442–4; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 476–84. Adamson, Noble Revolt, 488–94; Russell, Fall, 448–9. Adamson, Noble Revolt, 494–7. Russell, Fall, 450–1; Fletcher, Outbreak of the Civil War, 182–4. Russell, Fall, 454. State Papers Collected by the Earl of Clarendon, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1767), II, 138–9. Cust, Charles I, 332–3. Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, chap. 5, pt. III. Russell, Fall, 459–62. Russell, Fall, 478–50; Cust, Charles I, 334–5. Cust, Charles I, 337–41. Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads:  The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 132–135; Fletcher, Outbreak of the Civil War, 283–9, 302–5. 34. Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, chap. 5, pt. III. 35. Russell, Fall, 513–16; Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, chap. 5, pt. III. 36. Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War’, History, 72 (1987): 395–415. 37. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). 38. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), 209–11. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Further Reading Adamson, John, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007). Cust, Richard, Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625–1642 (Cambridge, 2013). Cust, Richard, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, 2005). Fletcher, Anthony, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981). Russell, Conrad, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990). Russell, Conrad, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991). Sharpe, Kevin, The Personal Rule of Charles I (London, 1992). Stevenson, David, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters (Newton Abbot, 1973; reprinted Edinburgh, 2003).

Chapter 5

The Irish Ri si ng Joseph Cope

The outbreak of the Irish rebellion in October 1641 represents a fundamentally important episode on the road to revolution. Primed with anti-popish fears stirred up in the early months of 1641, the rising could be interpreted as solid proof of the dangers that many perceived in Charles I’s kingdoms. In the 1660s, Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon, reflected on the significance of the rising, recalling that when news of the crisis reached the House of Commons on 1 November 1641, ‘there was a deep silence in the House . . . and a kind of consternation, most men’s heads having been intoxicated, from their first meeting in Parliament, with imaginations of plots and treasonable designs through the three kingdoms’.1 The letters announcing the rising sent to the English parliament from Dublin Castle presented the crisis in stark and simple terms, characterizing it as a ‘wicked and damnable conspiracy plotted and contrived . . . by some evil affected papists here’.2 In contrast to this simple reading of the rebellion, the 1641 rising exposed multiple fractures between and within Ireland’s diverse ethnic and religious groups. Focusing on the period between the 1641 fall of Charles I’s Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford, and the conclusion of the Cessation between Charles I and the Confederate Catholics in September 1643, it is possible to map out the reconfiguration of loyalties and the disintegration of pre-rebellion communities. As with the English civil war and revolution generally, historians must account for the long-term tensions that came to the surface during the conflict and the short-term and contingent factors that led to the initial outbreak of hostilities in October 1641. Source materials, particularly the 1641 depositions, preserve ample evidence of grievances dating at least as far back as the early seventeenth-century plantations. More immediate concerns arising from the destabilizing policies of Thomas Wentworth’s tenure as Lord Deputy in the 1630s also played an important role in driving the Irish crisis of 1641.3 But the conflict in Ireland cannot be neatly separated from the other mid-century crises within Charles I’s composite monarchy. Wentworth’s policies during the Scottish wars, the radicalization of English politics in 1641, and the crown’s furtive negotiations with the Confederate Catholics in 1643 underscore the importance of taking a broad British approach to the rising.

78   The Irish Rising It is at the same time important to balance the British dimensions of the rising against other perspectives. Within the past several decades, scholars have increasingly looked at the local contexts of the rebellion through research in the archive of contemporary testimony commonly known as the 1641 depositions.4 Microhistorical studies of the depositions reveal regional differences, local tensions, and interpersonal disputes. Moving in the opposite direction, some scholars have sought to internationalize understandings of the rising by drawing out parallels to the disintegrating composite monarchies elsewhere in Europe.5 England’s panicked response to the 1641 rising must be understood in an international context, with anti-popery providing a conceptual framework for making sense of the conflict. Finally, it is also necessary to be mindful of fragmentation within the various ethnic and religious interests in Ireland. Obviously the split between Catholics and Protestants loomed large in the mid-seventeenth century, as did the divisions between native Irish, Old English, New English, and Scots-Irish communities. Within these groups, however, historians have begun to map out significant tensions. Among Ireland’s Roman Catholic population, friction emerged between predominantly native Irish partisans in the rising and Old English elites who tried to distance themselves from the rebellion. As the conflict evolved, these tensions contributed to factionalism within the Catholic Confederacy, which worsened when Irish veterans of military service on the Continent returned to Ireland in 1642. Likewise among Ireland’s Protestants, the outbreak of the rising revealed deep fissures between New English and Scots-Irish planters. As the conflict wore on, evidence of internal fragmentation also appeared within the New English segment of the population, especially when it became necessary to take a side in the English civil war. Mid-seventeenth-century Irish politics can thus be conceptualized as a complex dance between various parties on constantly shifting ground. In order to understand the tensions that led to the 1641 rising, it is necessary to be mindful of the simmering resentment caused by the displacement of native Irish and Old English elites by New English during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The forces that accelerated the fragmentation of Irish society and created the specific catalysts for the rebellion, however, must be understood within the contingencies of the late 1630s and 1640s.

Irish Politics and the Fall of Strafford Charles I’s appointment of Sir Thomas Wentworth as Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632 forms the starting point for a discussion of the 1641 rising. As Lord Deputy, Wentworth had the responsibility to manage a religiously and ethnically diverse nation. The Irish population maintained the Gaelic language and other distinct cultural traditions and remained solidly connected to the Roman Catholic Church. The Old English, descendants of the twelfth-century Norman conquerors, saw themselves as distinct from the

joseph Cope   79 Irish population. However, by the seventeenth century, intermarriage and other cultural interactions and a common experience of marginalization by the Tudor church and state had eroded many of these distinctions. The New English represented late arrivals, appearing at the vanguard of Tudor policies aimed at centralizing power. Often the beneficiaries of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plantation schemes, which wrested power and land from Irish and Old English interests, the New English were a minority and almost exclusively Protestant population. Finally, Ulster housed a large Scottish population. In part this reflected traditional patterns of migration between Ulster and the Scottish isles. However, the Scots-Irish population had grown significantly in the early seventeenth century when James I, in an effort to broaden the ‘British’ base population in the north allowed Scots to take up land in the Ulster plantation. Thomas Wentworth arrived in Dublin with a mandate to resolve the crown’s financial woes in the kingdom, but achieving fiscal solvency put the Lord Deputy on a collision course with many entrenched interests in Ireland. Wentworth explored an expansion of the English plantations in Connacht and various means of wringing money and land out of existing landowners and new settlers. These policies successively alienated segments of the Irish, Old English, and New English populations.6 The Old English and Irish had ample cause to be suspicious of Dublin Castle. The Tudor and Stuart plantations in general reflected anti-popish and ethnocentric assumptions. The prescriptions for the plantation of Ulster imposed fundamental changes in land use and rural economy, mandated settlement by New English and Scottish migrants, and envisioned a new landscape dominated by fortified estates, English-style towns, and Protestant churches.7 In reality, few of the early modern plantations completely reflected the prescribed conditions. However, the plantations fundamentally realigned political and economic power and played an important symbolic role in communicating the state’s hostility to Irish customs and the Roman Catholic religion. By the early 1630s, elements within the New English administration at Dublin Castle appeared ready to extend the attack on Roman Catholicism. In the period immediately preceding Wentworth’s appointment, acting Lord Justices Adam Loftus and Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, made no secret of their hostility towards popery and presided over a period of assault on Catholic interests and religious practices. Wentworth’s regime moderated some of these policies, but the long-term anxieties remained. The Lord Deputy’s advocacy of expanded plantations in Connacht, which would have adversely affected Irish and Old English interests, added to these concerns. Wentworth’s policies in the 1630s badly strained his ties with his New English and Protestant constituencies. In a general sense the appointment of a stranger as Lord Deputy could be interpreted as a repudiation of New English leadership in Ireland. Wentworth made these problems worse through the pursuit of religious policies that upset the delicate working arrangement that had been achieved within the Church of Ireland in the decades before his arrival. In the minority in Ireland, many Protestants ascribed to an aggressively anti-popish worldview and perceived Catholicism as an existential threat.8 These anti-popish assumptions led to deep suspicion of Wentworth’s motives when, in the mid-1630s, anti-Calvinist bishops supported by the Lord Deputy

80   The Irish Rising gained prominence and fashioned policies that imposed greater conformity on the Church of Ireland. In the aftermath of the Scottish prayer book controversy in 1637, Wentworth’s government increased this pressure, using the Irish court of high commission to root out Covenanter sympathizers. As Wentworth pushed for conformity among Irish Protestants, the state’s perceived inattention to policing recusancy fed fears that the Lord Deputy planned to extend full toleration to Roman Catholics. The failed negotiations between Wentworth and the Old English magnates over ‘the Graces’—which would have firmed up uncertain Catholic land titles and eliminated some of the legal restrictions on the Catholic population—enhanced these fears. The fact that negotiations over the Graces failed proved doubly damaging to Wentworth, as the Lord Deputy found himself simultaneously alienated from New English who saw the Graces as a betrayal of the Protestant interest and Old English Catholics who felt that Wentworth had negotiated in bad faith. Wentworth’s actions during the Bishops’ Wars reflected how badly the Lord Deputy misunderstood his position in Ireland. Wentworth operated within a true British context in 1639–41, shuttling back and forth between London and Dublin several times while offering advice to the English privy council. Ironically, the Lord Deputy’s entanglements in a three kingdoms context opened the door to collaboration among a diverse range of otherwise mutually antagonistic players in Ireland. Wentworth arrived in England at Charles I’s request in September 1639 and played a key role in planning the king’s campaign to break the stalemate with the Scots. Confident about his command of the political landscape in Ireland, Wentworth, elevated to the English peerage as first earl of Strafford in January 1640, returned to Ireland in March 1640 with a plan for raising an army in Ireland for service in a summer campaign against the Covenanters. Initially, this plan worked well. The pliant Irish parliament that assembled in Dublin in March and April 1640 voted in favour of four subsidies and passed a declaration condemning the Covenanters. The collapse of the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, however, opened up opportunities for the Lord Deputy’s enemies in Ireland to act. During the second session of the Irish parliament in June 1640, foes on all sides—New English who had seen their local authority challenged by Strafford’s regime, committed Protestants angry about the direction of the Irish church, and Old English Catholics disgruntled over the Lord Deputy’s vacillations on religious liberty and ominous overtures on land tenure— assailed Wentworth’s authority. Within the Irish parliament, a coalition of men united by little more than their loathing of the Lord Deputy successfully stalled the subsidy to the extent that, when the Scots soundly beat Charles I’s forces at Newburn in August 1640, Wentworth’s much-touted Irish army had barely mobilized. During the third session of the Irish Parliament, which convened on 1 October 1640, the Irish parliament drafted a far-reaching condemnation of Strafford’s tenure as Lord Deputy. Reflecting its origins in a coalition of actors, the grievances outlined in the ‘Humble and Just Remonstrance’ largely focused on issues that transcended the confessional divide, particularly economic and constitutional issues. With the exception of complaints about

joseph Cope   81 the court of high commission and the failed negotiations over the Graces, Wentworth’s religious policies remained marginal to the case articulated in the Irish parliament.9 In contrast to the Irish parliament’s proceedings, when the Long Parliament took up the case against Wentworth, religion framed much of the discussion. In a speech on 7 November 1640 before a committee of both houses, Sir John Clotworthy, a planter in county Antrim and sitting MP for Bossiney, Cornwall, claimed that Wentworth had perverted religion, abetted corruption, and turned a blind eye to the proliferation of popery. Wentworth’s intrusion into the Scottish conflict revealed his sinister potential, Clotworthy warned, as the Lord Deputy now had in arms 8,000–10,000 ‘papists, ready to march where I know not’.10 The articles of treason drawn up by the English House of Commons against Strafford in late January 1641 seized upon these points and even more emphatically tied the Lord Deputy to shadowy plots, presenting the Irish army as a force ‘of papists, his dependents . . . which he might employ to reduce this kingdom’.11 During the English Parliament’s proceedings against Wentworth, anxiety about the Lord Deputy’s actions spread beyond the halls of Westminster. Large-scale and tense public protests occurred throughout the trial and during debate over the Bill of Attainder against Strafford. The Lord Deputy’s execution on 12 May 1641 drew out a crowd estimated by contemporaries as numbering 100,000.12 What had begun as an Irish parliamentary protest against Wentworth’s overreaching had become an opportunity for anti-popish politicking in the English parliament and mass demonstrations in London. The fears of a popish plot that had been stirred up during this period in many respects structured English understandings of the events in Ireland for the next several years. In Ireland, the evolution of the case against Wentworth in the Long Parliament, combined with Charles I’s apparent inability or unwillingness to prevent the execution of one of his closest advisers, frightened many Old English and Irish lords and gentry. Since 1495, Irish politics operated under Poyning’s Law, which established the Irish Parliament’s subordination to the English Privy Council. The English Parliament’s claims to possess jurisdiction over the Lord Deputy now pointed to a significant expansion of Westminster’s role in Irish policies. With Wentworth out of the picture, anti-popery a driving force in English popular and parliamentary politics, and the constitutional arrangements uncertain, Ireland’s Catholics found themselves in a suddenly vulnerable position.

Disintegration: The 1641 Crisis In the face of a feared crackdown on popery originating from the English Commons, two parallel and largely insulated strategies emerged among Irish Catholic elites. Within the Irish parliament, members pressed for a constitutional settlement, taking advantage of the power vacuum to try to roll back the policies of the 1630s. More aggressively, some also saw the elimination of Wentworth as an opportunity for the Irish parliament to assert its autonomy and revise the operations of Poyning’s Law.13 Disgruntled leaders

82   The Irish Rising of the most powerful native Irish families, however, began to explore a very different response to the anxieties stirred up by the Wentworth trial. Among the Irish, Connor, Lord Maguire, and Rory O’More took on early leadership roles in the summer of 1641, networking with prominent families in Ulster, including the Maguires in county Fermanagh, the O’Neills in county Armagh and county Monaghan, the O’Reillys in county Cavan, and the McMahons in county Monaghan. They also connected with officers of Wentworth’s Irish army at Carrickfergus and with Irish officers serving overseas in the Spanish army, most notably Owen Roe O’Neill. Although the chief Old English families were not directly involved in the plotting of the rebellion, this confederacy had at least some contact with prominent Palesmen including Colonel Richard Plunkett and Nicholas Preston, Lord Gormanston. The Irish plotters of the 1641 rising had ample cause for discontent and fear. Although the peace that concluded the Nine Years War in 1603 had allowed Irish lords to maintain significant landholdings and local power, the early years of James I’s reign witnessed growing pressure on Irish and Catholic interests. In the face of this, in 1607 two of the most powerful Ulster magnates—Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, earl of Tyrconnell—and their followers abandoned Ireland for the Continent. Their departure cleared a path for the crown to seize and redistribute massive landholdings in the modern counties of Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone. The flight of the earls and the subsequent Stuart plantations had been devastating for those Irish who stayed behind. Research on prominent Irish families in Ulster on the eve of the rebellion presents a grim picture of resentment, anxiety, economic dislocation, and indebtedness.14 In contrast to those Old English who sought constitutional change through the Irish parliament, many Irish elites seem to have felt much less optimistic about their future in post-Wentworth Ireland. One index to the depths of this pessimism may be found in the fact that a number of Irish gentry who served English legal and political institutions participated in plotting the rising. Sir Phelim O’Neill, who had been an MP and a justice of the peace, perhaps best embodies this, but similar examples can be found among the O’Rourkes in county Leitrim, the O’Farrells in county Longford, and the O’Reillys in county Cavan. These men had stakes in the existing political order and yet threw their lot in with rebellion.15 According to the conspirators’ plan, the rising would include two main components. Lord Maguire and Hugh MacMahon gathered a body of armed men in Dublin with plans to take the Castle by surprise on the night of 22 October 1641. As this Dublin stratagem unfolded, gentry-led Irish in Ulster would rise up and disarm settlers in key plantation settlements. Effectively decapitating the state, the seizure of Dublin would prevent a coordinated response to these loosely coordinated local risings. In the event, the plot did not proceed as planned. The campaign against Dublin Castle disintegrated on the evening of 22 October when Owen O’Connolly, a kinsman of one of the Dublin leaders, revealed details of the engagement to Sir William Parsons, one of the two acting Lord Justices. In Ulster, however, the rebels found greater success. The lead conspirators targeted strategically significant settlements and disarmed New English

joseph Cope   83 planters and garrisons. Over the next several days, Phelim O’Neill disarmed British settlers from an arc of territory in central Ulster extending from Dungannon to Newry; forces under Rory Maguire in county Fermanagh and the O’Reillys in county Cavan found similar success within the first week of the rising. Even at this early stage of the rising, it is possible to discern a constitutional motive. On 4 November, Phelim O’Neill issued a declaration from Newry purporting to possess a commission from Charles I authorizing attacks on English settlers.16 The forged commission presented justification for the rising in constitutional terms, complaining of the English parliament’s intrusion on royal prerogative and warning that the king feared ‘these storms blow aloft and are very likely to be carried by the vehemency of the Protestant party into our kingdom of Ireland and endanger our royal power there’.17 The O’Reillys in county Cavan likewise asserted a ‘great cause of fear in the proceedings of our neighbour nations’ and signalled a desire to negotiate with Charles I over Catholic grievances including the failed Graces.18 The depositions preserve similar evidence, as well as accounts of participants in the rising citing the Scottish Covenanters’ evolving relationship to the crown as a template for Irish aims.19 These references suggest a rough understanding of how the constitutional relationship between the Irish parliament, the English parliament, and the crown had evolved. Fears of the Long Parliament’s agenda played an integral role in this framing of the rising, but at least some partisans in the rising also seem to have believed that the British crisis of the 1640s had opened the door to a radical reconstruction of the constitutional relationship between Charles I and his Irish subjects.20 Over the past two decades, scholarship on the social history of the 1641 rebellion has proliferated, in large measure thanks to historians’ rehabilitation of the 1641 depositions. Consisting of a disparate collection of accounts taken primarily from despoiled settlers in the 1640s and early 1650s and archived at Trinity College Dublin, the 1641 depositions provide a rich source of evidence, not least about the differing regional manifestations of the rebellion and local and individual experiences with violence and survival. Deposition evidence suggests that as the traditional structures of authority disintegrated in October and November 1641, a popular rebellion emerged. The violence of the early weeks of the rising reflected inequalities that had been created and sustained by the Stuart plantations, with evidence suggesting that participants pursued grievances arising from economic hardship and debt. Likewise, rebel references to perceived New English abuses of the law suggest resentment over the loss of political power and social prestige.21 It is also clear that some violence simply arose from opportunistic attacks on dispersed and disorganized settlers.22 In some cases, the depositions allow a close look at specific attacks and the interpersonal dynamics that informed violence. For example, in an article on the murder of Arthur Champion, a New English planter in Fermanagh, Raymond Gillespie, finds that the outbreak of the rising presented an opportunity to avenge a history of bad neighbourly behaviour and a generally quarrelsome disposition.23 The depositions also shed light on social dynamics in local communities. The failure of English planters to mobilize for self-defence, the refusal of Scots planters to join with English neighbours against

84   The Irish Rising the rebels, and examples of New English Protestants renouncing their religion suggest isolation, fragmentation, and mistrust within the settler population. On the other hand, microhistorical evidence demonstrates how some newcomers had been able to build community relationships across confessional and ethnic lines. In county Cavan, the experience of the Scottish minister George Creichton demonstrates how ties of charity, neighbourhood, and kinship could assist an endangered settler during the rising.24 Deposition evidence also reveals divisions between Scottish and English settlers during the first weeks of the rising. Whereas English planters seemed unable to respond collectively to the outbreak of the rising in Ulster, the Scots proved much more capable of organizing for self-defence. At Killeshandra in county Cavan, Sir James Hamilton and Sir James Craig organized a garrison that held out against the rebels until the summer of 1642.25 In the Laggan valley, Sir William Stewart and Sir Robert Stewart organized a militia force that remained active in north-west Ulster throughout the 1640s.26 This partially reflects the fact that the rebels focused their attention on English settlers during the first weeks of the rising, largely avoiding conflict with the Scots. The fact that the Scottish plantations tended to be more ethnically homogeneous and organized around kinship ties also proved significant. There are numerous references to rebel partisans who claimed that they had no intention of attacking their Scottish neighbours, and the depositions reflect some accommodation between the rebels and Scottish planters in the north, including a handful of cases in which deponents alleged that Scots took pleasure in witnessing and sometimes participated in attacks on English settlers.27 The presence of Scottish Catholics should also not be overlooked. In the early months of 1642, for example, the earl of Antrim’s Scottish tenants joined with the Irish rebels. This material also suggests a significant ethnic component to the rising, which connects to repeated assertions in the depositions that Irish rebels waged symbolic attacks on English cultural artefacts, for example massacring English breeds of livestock.28 A growing number of local studies of the rising based on the depositions point to significant regional differences. For example, references to acts of violence appear more commonly in central Ulster than in depositions from the south and east. The rebellion manifested itself in Munster and Leinster gradually, giving settlers time to prepare for self-defence or flight. Depositions from the Munster plantations also suggest a great deal of interaction between various religious and ethnic constituents, including intermarriage and bilingualism, which may have mediated some local tensions.

Framing the Rebellion: The 1641 Rising and the Crisis of the Three Kingdoms In contrast to the complexities evident on the ground in Ireland, English observers found it easy to make sense of the rising. In the spring of 1641, the architects of Wentworth’s trial had framed the Lord Deputy’s actions as part of a broader popish plot.

joseph Cope   85 The rising confirmed these fears and widespread print coverage played an important role in further disseminating anti-popish anxieties. As much as one-third of England’s total print output in October 1641–March 1642 dealt in some manner with the rising.29 Much of the English print coverage of the rising stressed atrocity and asserted that Irish Catholics waged a war of extermination against Protestants and Englishmen. Typically short and cheap, pamphlets and tracts on the rebellion contained many sensationalized elements, including graphic and melodramatic scenes of arbitrary violence. A tract entitled Treason in Ireland, for example, described the murder of Protestant children, the massacre of twenty families in a plantation town, the rape of a virgin in the presence of her captive parents, the decapitation and mutilation of an aged woman, and an incident in which Irish Catholics sexually assaulted an English maiden and then drowned her in a hot cauldron.30 Texts with lurid titles such as Bloody News from Ireland, The Rebels’ Turkish Tyranny, The Tears of Ireland, and Worse and Worse News From Ireland repeated similar accusations.31 Explicitly, a number of these works also connected the rebellion to Catholic interests on the Continent. For example, in his 1642 work entitled A Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland, Henry Jones, dean of Kilmore and chief collector of the 1641 depositions asserted ‘that from Spain they did expect an army. . . . From France also they looked for aid. Being in all this further encouraged by bulls from Rome.’32 Whereas atrocities and popish intrigue took centre stage in print, in general, the depositions tended to focus on theft and the destruction of property. Even in parts of Ulster where violence was significant, the evidence from the depositions is anything but clear. Close readings of particular acts of atrocity suggest significant differences in accounts, problems with chronology and coherence, and cross-fertilization as deponents failed to differentiate between events that they had witnessed directly and those that they had heard about from other settlers.33 Interpreting other kinds of violence can be equally difficult. For example, English pamphlets repeatedly asserted episodes of rape, but references to these crimes are almost non-existent in the depositions.34 English printed material provides evidence of growing mistrust of Charles I’s conduct. Although no pamphlet went so far as to assert the king’s participation in the rising, cheap print did publicize rebel claims about royal support for their actions, often framing these accounts as examples of Irish treachery. Henry Jones’s Remonstrance, for example, dwelled upon the forged commission, reported on rebel rumours that Charles was present in Ulster, and repeated rebel boasts that the queen had played a key role in directing the rising.35 The English parliament participated directly in the process of connecting the rebellion to popish plots. Within days of receiving news of the rising in November 1641, John Pym renewed discussion of the Grand Remonstrance in the Commons. This document reiterated suspicions of Wentworth’s conduct and connected generic anti-popish fears to the outbreak of the rebellion. In Ireland, the Grand Remonstrance asserted, ‘they have had time and opportunity to mold and prepare their work’ and only divine providence had stopped them from having ‘totally subverted the government of it, routed out religion, and destroyed all the Protestants’.36

86   The Irish Rising Reconstruction of reader response to this material is difficult, but the evidence from crowd protests in London and petitioning campaigns in the provinces suggests that this synthesis of recent Irish events found a sympathetic audience. The last week of December 1641 proved especially intense in the metropolis, with the Commons accepting several petitions from diverse constituencies of Londoners who connected the Irish rebellion to calls for reform of the Church of England and self-defence against popish enemies. Outside London, the rising also had a destabilizing effect. Settlers fleeing from the Irish conflict began appearing in English and Scottish ports in December and January, bringing with them tales of misery and woe. Panics, although not common, also occasionally broke out in 1642 as local communities responded with fear to the movements of persons displaced from Ireland as a result of war.37 In Ireland, the English characterization of the rising as a popish plot played an important role in forcing together mutually suspicious Irish and Old English Catholics. The Lord Justices’ proclamation of 23 October 1641 presented the rising as the work of ‘evil affected Irish papists’ and this underlying sentiment characterized Dublin Castle’s response to the rising.38 Over the winter of 1641–2, the state organized raids out of the city and commanders like Sir Charles Coote often failed to differentiate between loyal and rebellious Catholics. For Old English Catholics who had attempted to separate themselves from the rebellion, the state’s crackdown on popery and advocacy of indiscriminate violence proved demoralizing and destabilizing, and led to defections into rebellion.39 In turn, as Old English Catholics embraced the rising, Dublin Castle could further justify the brutality of New English attacks in the Pale. Thus, by the late spring of 1642, the Ulster-centred and Irish-led rebellion had morphed into a nationwide and multi-ethnic revolution. During the spring and summer of 1642, the conflict moved into a period of internationalization and stalemate. Although the Dublin administration seemed in danger of collapse in October and November 1641, by April 1642 things had turned around considerably. Troops based in Dublin had mostly pacified the Pale, albeit at the cost of alienating and driving away many loyal Catholics. Following a string of victories early in the war, Phelim O’Neill suffered a major defeat when New English troops raised the siege of Drogheda in March 1642, and with the coming of spring, reinforcements from England and Scotland could be expected. A force of 2500 Scots under General Robert Munro arrived in April, and proved immediately successful in rolling back the tide of rebellion in east Ulster. Many of these developments occurred in spite of rather than as a result of actions in the English parliament. Although parliamentary business in late 1641 had been dominated by Irish affairs, a concrete response to the rising developed slowly. Through the end of December 1641, the Commons focused primarily on symbolic acts, such as the Grand Remonstrance and the celebration of fast days to reflect on the crisis in Ireland. Inaction in parliament provided traction for claims of a popish plot, with some critics asserting that the long delays revealed the sinister machinations of a popish fifth column comprised of the Laudian bishops, Catholic lords, members of the Queen’s household, and English recusants.

joseph Cope   87 After the king’s flight from London in mid-January 1642, Irish affairs became a point of moderate cooperation between crown and parliament. In late January, Charles I authorized the Act for a Speedy Contribution and Loan, which created a mechanism for raising money to be used towards the relief of displaced Irish Protestants.40 In March, the more ambitious Act for the Speedy and Effectual Reducing of the Rebels in His Majesty’s Kingdom of Ireland, more commonly known as the Adventurers’ Act, passed into law.41 With the Adventurers’ Act, the English parliament claimed authority to seize and redistribute property belonging to men who had taken up arms in Ireland. On a practical level, the Adventurers’ Act funded the pacification of the rebellion with money contributed by English investors who would eventually be reimbursed with Irish land.42

Realignment: Charles I, the Catholic Confederation, and the Cessation The Adventures’ Act left little doubt that an English victory in Ireland would be followed by massive dispossession of Catholic property and a vigorous English parliamentary intrusion into Irish affairs. The Act formalized the constitutional revisions that the English parliament had been asserting since the trial of Thomas Wentworth. In what amounted to a heavy-handed intrusion on the king’s prerogatives, the Act prohibited royal pardons for Irish rebels without parliamentary authorization, gave the English parliament the mandate to determine when the counter-offensive in Ireland was complete, and created a panel of commissioners who would report directly to parliament on the progress of the war. Charles I did try to rein in some of this transformative momentum, refusing, for example, to provide a royal warrant to the parliamentary commissioners sent to Dublin in the autumn of 1642. Even so, the language of the new statute clearly indicated that the English parliament and its investor allies would play a much-expanded role in post-conquest Ireland. With the Adventurers’ Act, the Long Parliament thus created a mechanism for waging a war of conquest framed around the extinction of Irish Catholic political and economic interests. For Irish Catholics, this development played a key role in the formation of the Catholic Confederation in June 1642. As early as March 1642, Catholic clergy meeting at Kells agreed to excommunicate any Catholic who took up arms for Dublin Castle. In May and June 1642, meetings of priests and the heads of key Irish and Old English families at Kilkenny formalized these measures by creating a structure for managing the political and military situation in rebel-controlled territory.43 In the summer and autumn of 1642, Irish soldiers who had served Spain on the Continent began to return to Ireland. These professional soldiers helped improve the Confederate army, which in turn strengthened the bargaining position of the Catholic Confederation. A constitutional argument lay at the heart of Confederate activism. The oath of association promulgated at Kilkenny in June 1642 included a pledge of allegiance to Charles I.

88   The Irish Rising The Confederates, however, married this claim of allegiance to a call for substantial revisions to Ireland’s constitutional position in the British Isles. Confederate leaders hoped to see major concessions from Charles I, including the repeal of Poyning’s Law and the creation of an autonomous Irish parliament, official recognition of distinct Irish legal traditions, and guarantees of the free practice of the Roman Catholic religion. In the context of the British crisis of 1641–2, the proposed constitutional revisions were not entirely implausible. Indeed, many of the key principles floated by the Confederation paralleled the constitutional arguments of the Scottish Covenanters.44 The outbreak of civil war in England and the stalemate that developed after the battle of Newbury enhanced the potential for a negotiated settlement between Charles I and the Catholic Confederation. From the crown’s perspective, forces tied up in Ireland represented wasted resources, which could be used to the royalists’ advantage in the English theatre of war if a workable peace could be achieved in Ireland. Moreover, as the English conflict wore on, serious divisions emerged among the New English in Ireland. These tensions pitted those who identified themselves as primarily loyal to Charles I against those who saw themselves as primarily loyal to the anti-popish offensive and viewed the English parliament’s advocacy of the Adventurers’ Act as an important component of Ireland’s future security. The Confederate cause benefited from discord among New English and Protestant interests, but also showed signs of strain. As Micheál Ó Siochrú’s essay in this volume argues, it is easy to overstate conflicts between the Old English and Irish within the Catholic Confederation. At the same time, however, tensions between those who had pre-rebellion properties and prestige to fall back on, including many of the prominent Old English families, and those who had already suffered dispossession as a result of the plantations could create very different outlooks on a negotiated settlement with the king. Following several military setbacks in the spring of 1643, the Catholic Confederation entered into serious discussions with James Butler, first marquis of Ormond over a oneyear ceasefire. When Ormond announced the Cessation on 15 September 1643, it reflected the hopes of both parties rather than any tangible agreement on the complicated political and constitutional issues. For the crown especially, the agreement had a great deal of dangerous potential. Further negotiations with the Confederation would likely require concessions on constitutional issues and the prosecution of men who had participated in the early months of the rebellion. The Adventurers’ Act, however, rendered both requirements impossible. The potential for resumed hostilities when the Cessation expired also meant that Charles I would have to make a significant gamble if he intended to draw military resources out of Ireland to support the royalist cause in England. The Cessation also had the immediate effect of devastating hopes for further accommodation between the royalist and anti-papist factions of the New English in Ireland.45 A number of high-profile military commanders in service to Dublin Castle openly questioned or resisted the Cessation entirely. The Scots troops in Ulster also presented a major problem. The English parliament’s cooperation with the Scots left a major military force in the field and beyond the reach of the ceasefire agreement. As the conflict in

joseph Cope   89 Ireland evolved in the mid-1640s, these troops would become increasingly important in any political calculus.46 In a British context, the Cessation represented a major turning point. Predictably, the English parliament framed the Cessation as a major betrayal of the godly cause. Outrage over the Cessation in turn paved the way for formal cooperation between the English parliament and the Scottish Covenanters. On 25 September 1643, only ten days after publication of the ceasefire, parliament adopted the Solemn League and Covenant. This effectively completed the process of realignment that had begun in early 1643. Ormond and the Confederates had now entered into an uneasy and unpredictable ceasefire and began long-term negotiations for a peace favourable to English royalists. Tensions among the New English had exploded into open division. Opponents of the Cessation publicly connected themselves to the English parliamentary cause against the crown, and Ulster—seat of the 1641 rebellion and the region where the Irish rising had had its most important early successes—fell under occupation by Scottish forces allied with the English parliament. In retrospect, Charles I lost the most as a result of this realignment. In 1641, hints of crown complicity in the rising had appeared on the fringes of political discourse and were presented as evidence of the rebels’ treasonous disrespect for authority rather than as a criticism of the crown. With the Cessation, however, some Irish Protestant leaders now openly questioned the king. According to this view, Charles I, in an effort to expand his war against Protestants in England and Scotland, had allied himself with those Catholics who in 1641 had massacred scores of Protestant settlers. This was an important moment on the road to revolution in England. To his enemies, the crown’s participation in the Cessation provided further evidence of an untrustworthy king who was willing to make war against his own Protestant subjects. The representation of Charles I as a ‘man of blood’ owed much to this development.

Historiography and Historical Memory: The Long View of the 1641 Rising During the 1640s, published accounts of the rising often asserted authenticity by appealing to the authority of the Irish Lord Justices and by drawing on the 1641 depositions. Henry Jones’s Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland, which appeared in the spring of 1642, represents an early example of this kind of account. Prefaced by letters from the Irish Lord Justices attesting to its veracity, the Remonstrance assembled heavily edited and excised versions of depositions taken during the first month of the rising into an assertion of rebel intentions to enact ‘a general extirpation even to the last and least drop of English blood’.47

90   The Irish Rising The same general structure appears in Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion, first published in London in 1646. Like Jones, Temple presented selectively edited information from the depositions and supporting material from Dublin Castle administrators. The Irish Rebellion also reflected the realignments of the mid-1640s, presenting the Cessation as a betrayal of those Protestants who had suffered through the dislocations of 1641. Temple’s work had a unique longevity, appearing in at least ten editions over the next century and a half, with the last appearing in 1812.48 Asserting a simple version of the rising as an indiscriminate and brutal massacre of Protestants, Temple’s work fit comfortably with other early modern accounts of Protestant martyrdom, particularly John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.49 It also asserted the grossly exaggerated claim of more than 100,000 Protestant deaths, a figure that became deeply entrenched in slanted accounts of the rising.50 During episodes of political stress in the British Isles, appeals to memories of the 1641 rising could serve the interests of Protestant polemicists. John Milton’s Eikonoklastes, for example, justified the regicide in part by asserting that Charles I bore responsibility for more than half a million Protestant deaths in Ireland by having been ‘ever friendly to the Irish papists’.51 In the 1680s and 90s, a flurry of works drawing on memories of 1641 appeared in both England and Ireland, including a new edition of Temple and Edmund Borlase’s similarly structured History of the Execrable Irish Rebellion.52 Well into the nineteenth century, works of historical fiction such as William Godwin’s Mandeville (1817) and James Meikle’s Killinchy (1839), likewise asserted as fact a general and indiscriminate massacre of Protestants in 1641.53 Protestant commemorative culture sustained memories of the 1641 rising. From 1661 into the late eighteenth century, commemorations of the rising occurred in Dublin on 23 October.54 Printed versions of 23 October sermons, often stressing the cruelty of Roman Catholics and the theme of providential deliverance, began to appear in the crisis years of the mid-1680s and intensified after the Glorious Revolution.55 These fit into an arc of Protestant celebration that also incorporated commemorations of William III’s birthday (4 November) and Gunpowder Plot (5 November).56 Simplistic narrations of the rising stressing Catholic-on-Protestant violence survived in the service of sectarian agendas into the twenty-first century. References to mass drownings at Portadown, for example, appeared on Orange Order marching banners and public memorials.57 Essays disseminated by the Ian Paisley-affiliated European Institute of Protestant Studies likewise continue to present the rising as a ‘vicious, unprovoked bloodbath engineered by Rome against Protestants’.58 In part thanks to the dispossession of Irish Catholics in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest and the War of the Two Kings, few competing accounts of the rising appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Irish Catholics, however, did recognize the significant power of historical memory and the ways that commemorative culture in particular sustained interpretations of the rising that served anti-popish agendas. Thus, the short-lived Irish Patriot Parliament called by James II in 1689 abolished commemorations of 23 October.59 Occasional printed pieces framed the Irish rising as a matter of Catholic self-defence, critiqued the massively inflated

joseph Cope   91 casualty figures found in Temple and similar works, and counterpoised evidence of Protestant atrocities, including massacres of non-combatants, during the war. Hugh Reily’s Ireland’s Case Briefly Stated, originally published in 1695 and reprinted at several points in the eighteenth century represents the most thorough of such retorts to the Protestant historiography.60 Some of the earliest syntheses of the rising, particularly Jones’s Remonstrance and Temple’s Irish Rebellion, drew upon the 1641 depositions as evidence. It should therefore come as no surprise that debates on the reliability of the archive played an important role in the early historiography of the rising.61 Historians began to tentatively probe the depositions during the late nineteenth century. Much of this early work, however, misused the depositions and repeated assertions that would be familiar to seventeenth-century readers of John Temple. James Anthony Froude’s The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, for example, asserted that the depositions represented an ‘eternal witness of blood, which the Irish Catholics have from that time to this been vainly trying to wash away’.62 Mary Hickson’s Ireland in the Seventeenth Century bore an imperious preface by Froude and printed heavily edited versions of selected depositions that asserted universal ‘massacres . . . begun by the Roman Catholics on the 23rd of October at the instigation of the majority of their priests’.63 On the other side, critics such as Robert Dunlop and John T. Gilbert countered that the self-interested motives of the Dublin Castle administrators, the commissioners responsible for compiling the depositions, and the deponents themselves rendered the entire archive suspect. The former concluded that virtually all evidence pertaining to violence in the depositions had been tainted by the biases of men and women ‘maddened with recent losses and yearning for revenge’, which ‘rendered it impossible for us to discriminate between what was false and what was true in them’.64 Apart from an abortive attempt to calendar and publish the 1641 depositions under the auspices of the Irish Manuscripts Commission in the 1930s, the archive remained largely unutilized for much of the twentieth century.65 Over the past three decades, however, historians have rediscovered the richness of the archive and significantly expanded scholarship on the rising. Work with the depositions necessitates engagement with the biases of the witnesses and those who recorded testimony. Despite these challenges, the archive contains a wealth of evidence on social, economic, and cultural issues. The online release of the depositions, including both facsimile and transcribed versions of the archive and full text search capacities, opens dramatic opportunities for many more studies of the social and cultural context of the rising.66

Notes 1. Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford, 1888), I, 397. 2. John Nalson, An Impartial Collection of the Great Affairs of State (London, 1683), II, 514. 3. For historiographical surveys of literature on the rising, see in particular Toby Barnard, ‘1641: A Bibliographic Essay’, in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising

92   The Irish Rising (Belfast, 1993), 173–86; Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth Century Ireland and the New British Histories’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999): 446–62. 4. Aidan Clarke, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, in Peter Fox (ed.), Treasures of the Library: Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, 1986), 111–22. 5. Aidan Clarke, ‘Ireland and the General Crisis’, Past and Present [P&P], 48 (1970): 79–99; J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, P&P, 137 (1992): 58–9, 64–5; Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart Monarchies in the Mid-Seventeenth Century: Local Problems or Global Problems?’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane H. Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), 252–79. 6. H. F. Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633–1641: A Study in Absolutism (Manchester, 1959). 7. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), 187–205. 8. Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin, 1997), 161–2. 9. John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (London, 1721–), VIII, 11–14. 10. Maija Jansson (ed.), Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament (Rochester, NY, 2000), I, pt. 1, 37. 11. Rushworth, Historical Collections, VIII, 73. 12. Rushworth, Historical Collections, VIII, 773. 13. M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Montreal, 1994), 166–176. 14. Canny, Making Ireland British, 353–6. 15. Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 204–5, 219–20, 225–6; Canny, Making Ireland British, 493–4, 503–5. 16. Aidan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–1642 (Ithaca, NY, 1966), 165–8; PercevalMaxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 218–19; Raymond Gillespie, ‘Political Ideas and Their Social Contexts in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge, 2000), 113. 17. Trinity College Dublin Ms. 836, 18; R. Dunlop, ‘The Forged Commission of 1641’, English Historical Review [EHR], 2 (1887): 530–3. 18. John T. Gilbert (ed.), A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652 (Dublin, 1879), I, pt. 1, 364. 19. Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 234–5. 20. Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Catholic Confederates and the Constitutional Relationship between Ireland and England, 1641–1649’, in Brady and Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, 212–13. 21. Raymond Gillespie, ‘The End of an Era: Ulster and the Outbreak of the 1641 Rising’, in Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds.), Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society (Dublin, 1986), 205–7; Canny, Making Ireland British, 474–6; Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 229–33. 22. Canny, Making Ireland British, 512. 23. Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Murder of Arthur Champion and the 1641 Rising in Fermanagh’, Clogher Record, 14 (1993): 52–66. 24. Joseph Cope, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion (Woodbridge, 2009), 59–61. 25. Gilbert, Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland, I, pt. 1, 494–7. 26. Kevin McKenny, The Laggan Army in Ireland, 1640–1685: The Landed Interests, Political Ideologies and Military Campaigns of the North-West Ulster Settlers (Dublin, 2005), 35–55; David Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates: Scottish–Irish Relations in the Mid-Seventeenth Century (Belfast, 1981), 93–6.

joseph Cope   93 27. Canny, Making Ireland British, 482–3. 28. Perceval-Maxwell, Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, 232–3; Canny, Making Ireland British, 497. 29. Keith J. Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Irish Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1972–3): 144–7; David O’Hara, English Newsbooks and the Irish Rebellion, 1641–1649 (Dublin, 2006), 27–54. 30. Stephen Jerome, Treason in Ireland (London, 1641), 4–5. 31. Cope, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion, 76–88. 32. Henry Jones, Remonstrance of Diverse Remarkable Passages Concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland (London, 1642), 2. 33. Hilary Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh’, in Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641, 123–38. 34. Mary O’Dowd, ‘Women and War in Ireland in the 1640s’, in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (eds.), Women in Early Modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991), 91–111; Canny, Making Ireland British, 544–5. 35. Jones, Remonstrance, 5. 36. S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1906), 228. 37. Cope, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion, 112–18; Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, P&P, 52 (1971): 29–31. 38. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, new series (London, 1903), II, 1; Clarke, Old English in Ireland, 177; Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘The Irish Peers, Political Power and Parliament, 1640–1’, in Brady and Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, 174–5; Pádraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–9 (Cork, 2001), 23. 39. Robert Armstrong, Protestant War: The ‘British’ of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Manchester, 2005), 21–2, 33–6; Kenneth Nichols, ‘The Other Massacres: English Killings of Irish, 1641–2’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007), 176–91. 40. John Raithby (ed.), The Statutes that Passed into Law under Charles I and Charles II, Including the Legislation of the Long and Short Parliaments, before the Interregnum, and of the Restoration after (London, 1819) [SR], V, 141–3. 41. SR, V, 168–72. 42. Karl S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971), 44–7; Patrick Little, ‘The English Parliament and the Irish Constitution, 1641–9’, in Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001), 110–11. 43. Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999), 43–53. 44. Michael Perceval-Maxwell, ‘Ireland and the Monarchy in the Early Stuart Multiple Kingdom’, Historical Journal [HJ] 34 (1991): 282–3. 45. Armstrong, Protestant War, 92–3. 46. Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates, 145–9. 47. Jones, Remonstrance, 7; Joseph Cope, ‘Fashioning Victims: Dr. Henry Jones and the Plight of Irish Protestants’, Historical Research, 74 (2001): 370–91. 48. Kathleen Noonan, ‘ “Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies’, Albion, 36 (2004): 225; Kathleen Noonan, ‘ “The Cruel Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People”:  Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth-Century Policy and Propaganda’, HJ, 41 (1998): 176. 49. Noonan, ‘ “Martyrs in Flames” ’, 230–2.

94   The Irish Rising 50. John Temple, The Irish Rebellion, Or an History of the Beginning and First Progress of the General Rebellion Raised within the Kingdom of Ireland (London, 1646), 106. 51. John Milton, The Prose Works of John Milton (London, 1834), I, 306. 52. Toby Barnard, ‘ “Parlour Entertainment in an Evening?” Histories of the 1640s’, in Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641, 28. 53. John Gibney, The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (Madison, WI, 2013), 63–5, 97. 54. Toby Barnard, ‘The Uses of 23 October 1641 and Irish Protestant Celebrations’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991): 890; Toby Barnard, ‘Crises of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, P&P, 127 (1990): 56–7. 55. Barnard, ‘The Uses of 23 October 1641’, 894–5; Richard Anwell, ‘The 1688 Revolution in Ireland and the Memory of 1641’, in Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest (eds.), Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800 (Woodbridge, 2010), 75–6, 84–5. 56. James Kelly, ‘ “The Glorious and Immortal Memory”: Commemoration and Protestant Identity in Ireland 1600–1800’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 94 (1994): 42–3. 57. Brian Mac Cuarta, ‘Introduction’, in Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641, 187, n. 1. 58. Clive Gillis, Caustic Comments in Brief: Days of Deliverance Part 7, (19 February 2013). 59. Kelly, ‘ “The Glorious and Immortal Memory” ’, 29–30. 60. Gibney, Shadow of a Year, 79–81. 61. Barnard, ‘ “Parlour Entertainment in an Evening” ’, 36. 62. James Anthony Froude, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1874), I, 101. 63. Mary Hickson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, or the Irish Massacres of 1641–2 (London, 1884), I, 164. 64. R. Dunlop, ‘The Depositions Relating to the Irish Massacres of 1641: A Response’, EHR, 2 (1887): 339. 65. Gibney, Shadow of a Year, 138. 66. Trinity College Dublin Library, The 1641 Depositions, (26 February 2013).

Further Reading Armstrong, Robert, Protestant War: the ‘British’ of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Manchester, 2005). Bottigheimer, Karl S., English Money and Irish Land:  The ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971). Canny, Nicholas, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001). Clarke, Aidan, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (Ithaca, NY, 1966). Cope, Joseph, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion (Woodbridge, 2009). Gibney, John, The Shadow of a Year:  The 1641 Irish Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (Madison, WI, 2013). Lenihan, Pádraig, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49 (Cork, 2001). Mac Cuarta, Brian (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (Belfast, 1993). Ó Siochrú, Micheál, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649:  A  Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999).

joseph Cope   95 Ó Siochrú, Micheál (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001). O’Hara, David, English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion, 1641–1649 (Dublin, 2006). Ohlmeyer, Jane H. (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1990). Perceval-Maxwell, Michael, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Montreal, 1994). Russell, Conrad, ‘The British Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Historical Research, 61 (1988): 166–182. Stevenson, David, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates: Scottish–Irish Relations in the Mid-Seventeenth Century (Belfast, 1981).

Chapter 6

War and P ol i t i c s i n Engl and an d Wa l e s , 164 2– 164 6 Michael J. Braddick

There are many histories of the war in England and many more histories of English politics of the 1640s, but attempts to link the two are more difficult to find. Political histories tend to track the fate of particular blocks of opinion, and their shifting fortunes at Westminster or at the heart of the royalist war effort in Oxford. Military histories, on the other hand, tend to narrate campaigns, having first described the ways in which armies were put together, supplied, and organized. In fact these processes continually intertwined, as politicians mobilized for war.1 Military campaigns were an extension of the political process, part of an ‘armed negotiation’. How the activists mobilized support varied over time, and an important element of the process was political persuasion. This produced a rapidly shifting terrain of political argument, amplified by the very public debates which the appeal for support encouraged. This chapter narrates these shifts, as England became the cockpit for a wider set of conflicts in all three kingdoms. I then reflect on the advantages of analysing political mobilization rather than allegiance as a way of understanding both the dynamism and creativity of civil war politics, and the relationship between this short-term crisis and the longer-term history of state formation.

The Outbreak of the War in England It is conventional to claim that during 1642 England slid into war. This familiar phrase is often difficult to comprehend, however—how can a war start accidentally, or at least without considerable and conscious will to start one? The explanation in this case is that activists tried to take control of armed resources pre-emptively, fearing attack by

michael j. Braddick   97 their enemies. Active opponents of royal policy sought to take control of the country’s military resources in order to defend their political gains from what they feared would be a royalist reaction. Fundamentally, they were acting defensively—disarming first Catholics and then the malignant party that surrounded the king. The royalists, naturally, resisted this process, also seeking to take control of the military resources of the kingdom and in so doing fuelling fears for the future on the parliamentary side. Jostling became skirmishing and, in the autumn, open warfare.2 In the course of this process a paper war was fought, seeking to persuade a wider public about the fundamental principles at stake. Over the previous two years a print market had developed in England effectively free of pre-publication censorship; political issues were increasingly being discussed before an essentially unregulated audience. This went alongside escalating petitioning campaigns, and crowd actions. In London crowds had applied direct pressure on parliamentary proceedings, famously around the trial of the earl of Strafford, but also in the heated weeks leading to Charles’s departure from the city. In the counties too, crowd actions had a decisive political and military influence, often drawing on the rhetoric of national politics as justification.3 Many people saw these developments as a fundamental challenge to political decency. This process continued throughout the decade as political and military action was enabled, but also prompted by, the mobilization of constituencies that had previously been outside the reach of factional or partisan politics. Despite (or perhaps because of) the radicalization of the political process, this paper war was largely fought over the middle ground—both sides claimed to be acting to defend the constitution. Following the king’s departure from London in January 1642 parliament pursued strong measures to secure the kingdom for Protestantism. This involved both measures to exclude popish forces from political influence—such as excluding the bishops from the House of Lords—and measures of physical defence—disarming Catholics, preventing impressment by the king, and, in February, taking control of the command of the county militias.4 Some of this was done by ordinance—that is legislation which passed the Houses of Parliament but which did not have the royal assent necessary to make it a statute. In itself, the use of ordinances in these circumstances was potentially revolutionary. The king, meanwhile, avoided confrontation, perhaps waiting until the queen, who was increasingly plainly identified as one of the chief sources of popish threat in the kingdom, had been safely dispatched to the continent. By the time the Militia Ordinance had passed, on 5 March, Henrietta Maria was safe and Charles was in a more confrontational mood. There followed, during the spring of 1642, a series of public exchanges between king and parliament about the crisis, in a process that would have been unthinkable in normal times. Some of the most fundamental constitutional issues, and the most sensitive policy questions, were openly debated for an unregulated audience, and it included quite plain accusations about whose fault the crisis was. As the king moved northward the ideological claims escalated, and this was in close step with the radical political measures taken by parliament to ‘secure the kingdom’, leading to the articulation of a theory of parliamentary sovereignty and of a distinct view of the nature of political liberty. In May the Militia Ordinance was put into

98   War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646 execution—that is, the county militias were ordered to muster and train under parliament’s authority, by the power of ordinance.5 To accept such a measure was not only to deliver the principal military resources of the kingdom to parliament, but also to accept fundamental constitutional claims about where political power really lay. Moreover, it was hard not to realize this latter implication, since partisans had been spelling it out in print throughout the spring. Parliament therefore faced a considerable challenge in justifying its policies—taking political and military measures to secure the kingdom against the threat of popery—and the constitutional means being used to pursue them—ordinances. And the problem was made worse by the fact that attendance in both Houses was falling as those alarmed by these developments chose to stay away. Some of the key public arguments were framed ‘conservatively’—that is, with reference to precedent. For example, it was claimed that parliament could act as the Great Council of the kingdom when the king was away or incapacitated, and that matched the current situation.6 As the confrontation escalated, however, some of the parliamentary arguments set out principles that were both fundamental and potentially revolutionary. In particular, the Nineteen Propositions—a list of demands issued in May in response to a royalist challenge—set out a number of specific measures which amounted to the subordination of royal authority in key areas to parliamentary approval. The royalist response very plausibly presented this as a change to the constitution and that prompted parliamentarian sympathizers to spell out a theory of parliamentary sovereignty—that the supreme authority in the land was the parliament because it was the body which preserved the salus populi, the good of the people.7 This was populist in principle and practice, since the arguments were being rehearsed in print for an audience which could not be controlled, and there was a drift of support to the king by people alarmed by the implications of this, in the light of the street politics and rural discontents of the last two years.8 The practical royal response to the Militia Ordinance was to order musters by a different authority—Commissions of Array. Individuals were charged with mustering men by personal command of the king and out of personal loyalty to him. This forced a practical choice, whether to obey one or the other, as well as creating the basis for rival military powers.9 Key military resources, such as the arsenals at Hull and Portsmouth, or Dover Castle, were contested, or taken over by sleight of hand, and over the summer command of local militias and strong points led to some tense military confrontations—in Manchester in July, for example, or at Sherbourne Castle in September.10 Parliament won control of the navy, which was to help sustain beleaguered forces in the West Country in the early years of the war, although it was not a sufficient force to prevent the supply of the royalist armies.11 This struggle for control of local military resources for defensive reasons was entangled with the formation of field armies intended for active campaigning. It is conventional to date the latter development to August, when the king raised his standard at Nottingham and summoned his supporters to join him. In fact, the two processes had entwined for some time prior to that, and in early September parliament had created a field army under the earl of Essex recruited largely from the London musters. On the

michael j. Braddick   99 royalist side the musters under the Commission of Array provided the basis for the king’s field army too.12 By the time open warfare came it was late in the campaign season—moving troops and equipment became much more difficult in winter and the most active fighting in the war took place in the summer months. The two armies manoeuvred in the midlands, leading to a skirmish at Powick Bridge, outside Worcester, which is usually seen as the first battle of the war. The two armies met in earnest a month later at Edgehill, near Banbury, as parliament sought to block the king’s advance on London. The battle was bloody, and shocked most observers, but it was not decisive. Parliamentary forces withdrew northwards the next day, and battle was not rejoined. Following some delay the main royalist army continued its advance on London, an advance party storming Brentford and the main army drawing up to face the parliamentary defenders at Turnham Green. This time, however, there was to be no battle; after a day of confrontation the royalist army withdrew and the campaign season was over.13 The key political issues from late 1641 onwards were, on the one hand, the threat of popery and its influence within royalist counsels, and the measures necessary to defend against it, and on the other, the threat of populist parliamentarian Protestantism, and the challenge it posed to political decency and the constitution. These immediate issues led to the introduction of practical measures which required constitutional justification, and this ideological escalation had moved in step with military mobilization. This was to be a feature of the years of open warfare—the need to secure military security, or victory, prompted measures which in themselves required political justification. They were justified to public audiences in print, through rival mobilizations in the counties and on the streets of London. This created an increasingly chaotic political debate, out of which arose very radical political arguments.

Administrative and Political Escalation in 1643 The end of the fighting in late 1642 allowed the resumption of direct negotiation. In January the royalists received parliamentary commissioners in Oxford for peace negotiations—the Oxford treaty—but there was little shift in position on either side and the arguments did not move very far. Part cause and part effect of this was the fact that while they negotiated, the two sides also sought to mobilize to win a war.14 From the winter of 1642/3 onwards escalation brought political realignment within both camps: as war escalated so did tensions within each side. This was something of a contrast with the winter and spring of the previous year: it was much more obviously an active, offensive, military action. On the parliamentary side in particular this shift to preparation for a war, as opposed to primarily defensive attempts to secure control of military resources, produced administrative innovations which dramatically shifted the political arguments about the nature of the parliamentary

100   War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646 cause, and led to some changes of side. While much of the political argument continued to seek out consensual middle ground, it was more difficult to reconcile with what the two armed camps were actually doing. Charges of hypocrisy filled the air, while some more radical arguments were made in print.15 One symptom of the escalating military conflict was the reduced space in which to be neutral or non-combatant. Over the summer and autumn of 1642 a number of areas had seen formal agreements to avoid open war, but these proved increasingly difficult to sustain. Armed parties emerged for the first time in a number of places during the spring, and the official position on non-alignment hardened. In March, for example, parliament approved a Sequestration Ordinance, which gave powers to seize the property of ‘malignants’. Not only did this subordinate property rights to the power of Ordinances, but the definition of malignant was also very broad—it included, for example, those who did not pay parliamentary taxes. In early May a penal tax, the 5th and 20th part, was imposed on those who failed to support the parliamentary cause. As this suggests, one reason why the space for non-partisanship became narrower was the escalating scale of administrative and military mobilization: to fail actively to support the war effort was clearly to hinder it.16 In late February, the Assessment Ordinance had established a new tax, primarily based on land, which hugely increased the burden of public taxation. Administrative districts had large sums allocated to them and were simply left to divide it up by whatever means seemed fair. The origins and fairness of the quota are difficult to evaluate. At the same time counties were associated together on a much larger scale, under new committees with extensive powers, replacing (or at least rivalling) the existing structure of county government. In March there was a proposal to introduce an excise tax on domestic consumption, something which before the war had been regarded with horror, and it was eventually imposed in August 1643. These novel taxes and administrative powers were coordinated by a new structure of national and local committees, again of questionable constitutional propriety.17 One difficulty arising from these new forms of mobilization was that they might make the cure look worse than the disease. The two sides were in fact coalitions, often held together by fear of what the other side was trying to do, rather than a shared view of the religious and political future. Those afraid of the king’s constitutional innovations might now have pause for thought, given both these innovations and parliament’s claims about sovereignty or its willingness to address political issues directly to the people. The core claim on the parliamentary side, stressed in the discussions of these administrative measures, was that parliament was in defensive arms to protect the kingdom’s religion and liberties. During the spring this was interpreted as a call to further religious reformation: a parliamentary committee, the Harley Committee, set about purifying London of idolatrous images, the great Cross at Cheapside was pulled down, and, later, Charles’s Book of Sports (which set out what diversions were acceptable on the Sabbath) was burned on the site.18 This pointed up tensions in the parliamentary alliance between those who, crudely stated, wanted to defend the church against Charles’s popery, and those who saw the opportunity to complete the purification of an incompletely reformed church. In the

michael j. Braddick   101 press and public debate the dangers of religious pluralism and undisciplined zeal were increasingly stressed, creating tensions between different parts of the parliamentary alliance.19 As events shifted and new policies were introduced, the politics of the coalitions and individual allegiances had to be reconsidered. We know much more about this on the parliamentary side, but it seems to have been true among the royalists too. On the parliamentary side there was a clear counter-pressure to fix definitive versions of the ‘cause’ around which the alliance could be secured. Two crucial measures here were to convene an Assembly at Westminster to debate and define the religious practice which parliament would see established in place of the Caroline church, and the imposition of the Vow and Covenant (following the Waller plot to deliver London to the royalists), by which individuals swore to uphold a particular version of the parliamentary cause. Pym seems to have favoured this latter approach, seeking on a number of occasions to imitate the Scottish success in drafting a statement like the National Covenant behind which all the well-affected could line up. In England it failed. In the Eastern Association the initial desire had been to swear an oath and then mobilize voluntarily behind it, but in the event the war was supported by Ordinances enforced by committees. Nationally it failed as successive documents were produced, which were slightly at odds with one another—the Protestation, the Vow and Covenant, and, most notoriously and problematically, the Solemn League and Covenant later in the year.20 Royalist administrative innovation was, by contrast, less marked. The king’s main army was formed on the basis of the Commissions of Array. These had been slow to get going and at Edgehill had resulted in some troops being poorly armed—Welsh contingents, for example, included men using pitchforks—but did eventually produce a substantial army. This was probably the largest the infantry got, however, and thereafter numbers could be maintained only with difficulty. The 1643 recruitment drive concentrated on filling the existing regiments, not reforming the structure. The numbers of horse, by contrast, were doubled in the subsequent eight months, and this remained the core of the cavalry in the main army into 1644. Although the regimental structure was retained there were attempts to regularize the supply of the army, but again they were much less radical than changes to the parliamentary mobilization. In January an assessment was agreed for Oxford which became a model for other counties, related to the number of troops to be quartered in any particular place. The system was decentralized, however: little of the money passed through royalist headquarters in Oxford, and there was a high degree of local negotiation, and some abuse. The pattern of royalist mobilization remained the raising of regional armies by individuals, which were loosely coordinated by the royal council of war, which was in any case politically divided.21 Nonetheless, the pressure of events was causing creative shifts in royalist thinking too. It has recently been suggested that between poles of opinion that sought, on the one hand, a clear military victory or, on the other, a speedy political accommodation were those who wanted to make enough concessions in order to cut the ground from under the feet of the ‘fiery spirits’ on the parliamentary side. The viability of this tactic was clearly affected by the military fortunes of the armies. It also intersected with the

102   War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646 religious aims of the royalists. Rather than a dogged adherence to a pre-civil war church in the face of increasingly wide-ranging challenges, royalist religion has been interpreted as a much more dynamic phenomenon, in which defence of clerical authority, and a national church, took different forms according to circumstance. At the outbreak of the war, it could appear straightforwardly to be a defence of the established church (shorn of Laudian innovation) in the face of radical challenge. As war and negotiation developed, however, this clericalist position might lead royalist clergy into conflict with leading royalist politicians, and even to seek to protect their position from the king himself. These tensions gave rise to radical statements about episcopal and clerical authority, and even for religious toleration.22 By the late summer the increased tempo of military mobilization had not produced a decisive outcome, although the royalists had the better of the fighting. The parliamentary measures of reform in the spring and early summer had taken place against a backdrop of generally disheartening military news. Ralph Hopton fought a successful royalist campaign in the west through much of the year, culminating in the famous victory at Roundway Down on 13 July. The earl of Newcastle was similarly successful in the north of England, winning a famous victory at Adwalton Moor in June. Meanwhile Henrietta Maria had been able to land at Bridlington in the spring, bringing military supplies to the king, and Cholmley, the parliamentary commander at Scarborough, deserted the cause. Parliament had some success in Lancashire, leading the earl of Derby to flee into exile on the Isle of Man, and Charles Waller fought a successful campaign in the south of England. Campaigning in Cheshire was indecisive, despite the important royalist victory at Hopton Heath in March. The earl of Essex, who had been guarding western approaches to London, hampered by disease among his troops, finally advanced on Oxford in June, only to meet a decisive defeat at Chalgrove Field, where John Hampden, the parliamentary hero, received fatal injuries.23 These complicated regional campaigns, and the shifting picture they present, have sometimes been reduced to order by the claim that there was a royalist master plan—of a three-pronged advance on London from Oxford, and from the west (Hopton) and the north (Newcastle). It seems more likely that for contemporaries the picture was as it appears to us—a series of regional campaigns in which the armies moved in the directions they were best able to, and from which a mixed picture of victories and failures emerged.24 The general consensus is clear, however: the royalists had the better of the fighting through the summer of 1643. However, the tide of royalist successes was stayed, if not turned, by relief of a siege of Gloucester by Essex’s army in early September: it marched out from London and managed to get back there in time for winter quarters, having survived a major battle at Newbury on 19 September. More minor successes followed, notably in Lincolnshire where Oliver Cromwell was building a reputation as a cavalry commander, and the parliamentary military cause had survived. Towards the end of the summer both sides had also secured outside help. Between 1640 and 1642 government in England had dissolved partly as a result of reactions to rebellions in Scotland and Ireland. Charles’s reactions were feared to be revealing about the future direction of politics in England, and raised the stakes in discussion about

michael j. Braddick   103 how England should be governed. During 1643 military fortunes drove parliament to conclude a political deal with the Scots—the Solemn League and Covenant—which secured their help in winning the war in England, while the king was driven to negotiate a Cessation in Ireland, which would allow him to bring troops back to England.25 This was, in effect, to unify political and military conflicts by creating a single war, the War of the Three Kingdoms. This added considerably to the complexity of negotiating a peace, of course, since the Scottish and Irish now had a stake in the English settlement. In particular, the terms agreed for Scottish involvement were irksome to a significant part of the parliamentary alliance, and caused much friction after the war. On the royalist side this represented a victory for the hawks, and led to fresh divisions over this foreign intervention in the English war.26

The War of the Three Kingdoms There had been no peace negotiations over the winter and the third year of the war opened at a new pitch of intensity. The Scots crossed into England in January, opening up a new front in the war in England. Troops arrived in England from Ireland throughout the year, although their numbers were probably exaggerated. This and the following year of the war were to see the largest numbers of deaths.27 Military mobilization on both sides was now regularized, and involved the exercise of new powers. All this was hard to reconcile with the claims made by parliament in 1641 and 1642 about their defence of custom, property, and the established religion. Moreover, as a parliamentary victory began to seem more likely, tensions were evident over what kind of peace was required. In another remarkable political escalation, Charles had called an alternative parliament, which assembled in Oxford on 22 January 1644. Under the direction of the Oxford parliament, following the defeat at Newbury, there were attempts to reform the royalist war effort. Auxiliary regiments were formed for defensive purposes, in order to free up regular soldiers for service in the field armies. Conscription, which had been used in the previous two years of the war, was stepped up in order to improve the strength of the infantry. There were also proposals to reform the cavalry by creating eight new regiments, partly though the amalgamation of existing units, which still bore the stamp of their origin in the response of individuals to the Commission of Array in 1642. The Oxford parliament was persuaded to imitate parliamentary sequestration and excise. Finally, there were attempts to regularize the royalist assessment in response to complaints from both soldiers and civilians. Nonetheless, infantry numbers remained below the level achieved in 1642 and early 1643, and the reform of the horse had achieved little by the time of a major muster at Aldbourne Chase, in the summer of 1644.28 Neither did the Cessation add much to the effort—the numbers arriving back from Ireland were much lower than parliamentary propaganda suggested, and there was a high political cost in the (erroneous but much credited) accusation that they had effectively recruited Irish Catholics to suppress English religion and liberties.29

104   War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646 The principal development on the parliamentary side was the intervention of the Scots. They had not saved the day in late 1643—that had been achieved by the relief of Gloucester and relative success in the battle at Newbury—but there is no doubt that during 1644 the opening of a new front in the north of England considerably improved parliament’s fortunes, and created the possibility of an outright military victory.30 In the spring the royalists were pushed back in the West Country by Waller in a campaign notable for the victory at Cheriton in March. The arrival of the Scots in the north of England put pressure on Newcastle’s royalist army with the result that the royalists were now more stretched in protecting Oxford, and their strongholds in the north and west. By the late spring both Oxford and York, the most significant royalist city in the north, were under pressure, the latter under siege from April. The king’s main army left Oxford, and drew Waller into an ultimately indecisive pursuit, which relieved pressure on the royalist cause in the West Country, and split the parliamentary effort in the south between Waller’s manoeuvres and the earl of Essex’s march to support parliamentary positions in the south. By June, however, the position of York was desperate, and a royalist army was sent to relieve the city. Prince Rupert interpreted his orders as not just to lift the siege but to engage the parliamentary army in battle which he did, with disastrous consequences, at Marston Moor on 2 July. The parliamentary victory was complete: the north was lost, Newcastle went into exile, and while the cavalry escaped to regroup and fight again, the royalist infantry numbers never recovered. The potential of this victorious battle to deliver victory in the war was lost, however. The earl of Essex, having carried out his orders to relieve parliamentary strong points in the south set off on a disastrous advance into the West Country, pursued by the king’s army and was eventually cornered at Lostwithiel. The earl escaped but the parliamentary army was forced into humiliating surrender. Worse still, Manchester and the other northern commanders were slow to follow up the victory at Marston Moor, so that the king was able to regroup, relieve pressure on royalist garrisons in the south and west, and confront Manchester’s army at the second, indecisive, battle of Newbury (28 October). These successful royalist campaigns, culminating at Lostwithiel and Newbury, did much to restore the overall position. Royalist recovery was further aided by the earl of Montrose who in August successfully raised a royalist army in Scotland.31 His victory at Tippermuir on 1 September was the prelude to a series of military victories, which gave the Covenanting army in England reason not to stray too far south. On the parliamentary side, however, many people blamed the failure to build on the great victory at Marston Moor on the personal deficiencies of the earls of Essex and Manchester. These disputes over military command were entwined with other issues too. The combined effects of administrative reform, political and constitutional innovation, and intensifying military conflict changed the nature of the debate, as did the widening of the English war (as it seems when viewed from this perspective) to embrace the wider War of the Three Kingdoms. The human and material costs were also rising, and the horrors witnessed by partisans and bystanders were multiplying.32 Parliament had clearly lost an opportunity for decisive victory and at Donnington Castle one element of the reason for this became clear. Cromwell, frustrated at the

michael j. Braddick   105 failure to capitalize on the victory at Newbury, argued with his commander, the earl of Manchester. Famously, Manchester remarked that ‘If we beat the King ninety and nine times yet he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the King beat us once, we shall be all hanged, and our posterity be made slaves.’ For Manchester, military victory could not achieve his ends, which remained defensive because the key issue was to avoid defeat while seeking a secure peace.33 This dispute reflected wider divisions over war aims but also over the nature of an acceptable peace settlement. Cracks were beginning to appear in the parliamentary coalition about how to bring an end to the conflict and about just what kind of peace would justify the suffering a victory would have entailed. Manchester was increasingly identified with the ambition to establish a presbyterian church in place of the existing church of England, and was a natural ally of the Scots in that respect. Cromwell not only wanted to prosecute the war more vigorously, but wanted to use military victory to establish a much wider liberty of conscience, which would be protected by preventing the establishment of a powerful national church with the capacity to police religious practice very closely. This dispute reflected an unresolved tension in the parliamentary alliance about whether the aim of reform was simply to roll back the religious innovations of Charles I’s reign, or to take the opportunity to complete a reformation which had not been as thorough as it should have been; and if the latter, what kind of further reformation was necessary. In 1641 leading religious opponents of Charles’s regime met at the house of Edmund Calamy and agreed to avoid public arguments over the future government of the church. But this pact began to break down in 1644, prompted in part by the publication of some influential independent pamphlets, which provoked presbyterian counter-blasts, partly by the military treaty with the Scots, and partly by the fate of the military cause.34 Partisans in this argument took to print and, after the war, tried to take control of key institutions of government in order to secure the kind of peace that they thought necessary. It then gave rise to some of the most vicious polemics about religious belief, such as Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, launched by one wing of the parliamentary cause against the other.35 In 1644 these increasingly obvious tensions intersected with discontent over the command of the army, and gave rise to two dramatic measures—the Self-Denying Ordinance and the new modelling of the army.36 The first measure barred members of parliament from military command, in part as a response to accusations that the war was creating vested interests (as indeed it was: the massive tax burden was a source of profit for some, of course). At a stroke this removed from military command all aristocrats, since they were members of the House of Lords. The suspicion that this was directed against particular commanders for more immediate political reasons was reinforced by the fact that Cromwell was exempted (he should have relinquished his command, being an MP). This was justified, initially, by the need for him to carry out immediate duties, but was subsequently renewed.37 This change of command, sometimes seen as symptomatic of a larger assault on aristocratic authority, went in tandem with the creation of a new national army, not beholden to any regional association and answering directly to parliament’s military

106   War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646 command, the Committee of Both Kingdoms. It would have direct claims on pay and supply and would respond more efficiently to the strategic direction of parliament. It was also said to have been particularly attractive to those keen to prosecute the war vigorously and to resist a presbyterian settlement. That is something of an exaggeration, but the campaigns of 1645 seemed to reflect the advantages of this reorganization, as well as the radical religious and military zeal of many of the men.38

The Rise of the New Model Army Behind the Self-Denying Ordinance and the new modelling of the parliamentary army lay an argument about the peace that was to continue after the war, and which ultimately gave rise to the revolution. The reforms proved militarily decisive—the New Model won decisive victories in 1645, which effectively ended the war—but in the final stages of the war political tensions on both sides rose. As military reform promised to deliver an end to the war the stakes were raised in the argument about what kind of political settlement a military resolution would serve. Reorganization took some time though: the Self-Denying Ordinance and the New Model Ordinance were not passed until the later part of February, and the new officer list was not ready until March.39 In the meantime there had been a new round of peace negotiations, this time at Uxbridge, which opened on 30 January and lasted only three weeks. The issues presented, and the respective positions in relation to them, had not moved, and Charles’s own correspondence reveals how little store he had set by them.40 It was only in April that all the measures were in place and the New Model Army ready to march, and it did so to some scepticism on the royalist side. On 14 June, however, it won a crushing and decisive victory over the main royal army at Naseby. One thousand royalists died, as opposed to around 150 parliamentarians, but more importantly 4,000 prisoners were taken, along with artillery and supplies for a very large force.41 Worse, perhaps, the king’s correspondence was captured and later published, in an attempt to demonstrate that he was duplicitous and insincere in his negotiations with parliament.42 And this was clearly not a presbyterian victory. In the following months the advance of the New Model Army proved unstoppable. Leicester was captured on 18 June, Taunton eleven days later, and at Langport on 10 July Goring’s forces suffered a devastating defeat. Further major strongholds were captured: Bridgewater on 23 July and Bristol on 10 September. In the course of these campaigns local forces, autonomously organized, played a significant part. These ‘clubmen’ associations were mobilized by local communities and were formally speaking neutral, seeking to protect the localities from the depredations of the field armies. In practice they were not neutral, but on the whole were a help to parliament and a hindrance to the royalist troops.43 An element of this story was the way the royalist campaign had been organized, which explained their relative ineffectiveness and the attitude of the local population. There had been attempts to remodel the royalist forces, and something had been achieved by force

michael j. Braddick   107 of circumstance—the disaster at Marston Moor had forced a reorganization of the horse. Many of those who fought at Naseby had been in the king’s service for less than a year. Infantry numbers had suffered continual attrition, and desertion had been more or less winked at over the winter 1644/5 in the hope that the troops would return in the spring. They did not, however, and infantry numbers were low throughout 1645. In part this reflected a failure of supply. Money and arms continued to reach the royalist forces at least until the fall of Bristol in 1645.44 Goring’s troops, however, had been particularly ruthless in living off the land over the winter 1644/5, and they paid a price for that when their military fortunes faltered the following year as local people took the opportunity to withdraw support, or take revenge. While access to better resources is not now regarded as a determining factor in parliament’s ultimate victory, it is clear that during 1645 the superior supply and discipline of the New Model Army made it less of a burden to the civilian population, and that was an important factor in the campaigns in the West Country that year.45 By the winter of 1645/6 royalist prospects were bleak in England. In Scotland Montrose’s campaign had also collapsed. There was no further large-scale campaign between field armies but instead battles for control of the remaining royalist strongholds and the war in England during 1646 fizzled out in a return to 1642. Goring left for France in November while Hopton’s army was destroyed at Torrington in February and he surrendered in March. The ignominious end of the royalist war effort came in April, when Charles left Oxford in disguise and after a week of apparently rather aimless wandering surrendered to the Scottish army then camped at Southwell on 5 May. Oxford surrendered in June and Rupert and Maurice fled the country, and the final surrenders were those of Pendennis and Raglan castles in August 1646, and Harlech, which held out until March 1647. Royalist tactics had in one way become simplified by military defeat—to hold on to as much as possible, or to try to reopen the conflict in some way—although this continued to prompt disagreements about the propriety of foreign intervention, and creative thought about how to secure religious order and decency.46 Charles had opened this effort shrewdly by surrendering to the Scots which created tensions between the various elements of the parliamentary coalition. One strength of this strategy was that parliamentary politics, no longer simply defensive, had by contrast become more complex: the need to design a new settlement for the kingdom that would satisfy the parties to the war and the interests created by it.

Mobilization and the Radicalization of English Politics The story of how that played out is the story of the post-war revolution, but it is important to note what those post-war politics owe to the process of fighting the war itself. The failure to negotiate a peace prompted renewed fighting in 1648, and that was to lead to a further radicalization of views about what was necessary in order to secure

108   War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646 a peace. Throughout the decade political and military mobilization were closely connected: focusing on that process of mobilization helps us better to understand both the military and the political history of the period. It brings into focus the costs of the war, the politicization of administration, and the emergence of new political interests and players and provides a context for understanding the radicalization of politics, as people of increasingly diverse views articulated positions intended to justify or end the fighting, and garnered support for those positions. One important fact, perhaps the overriding fact arising from the war, was that it had been fought at appalling cost. Statistics derived from seventeenth-century sources are to be treated with caution, but it has been estimated quite plausibly that the war in England cost the lives of a greater proportion of the population than did the First World War. As many as one in ten adult males may have been in arms at some point during the war, perhaps one-fifth of the country’s urban housing was destroyed, and the financial burden of taxes and the many other more or less informal exactions was unimaginably high by pre-war standards. Many people, unaware of the statistics, would have been all too aware of the horrors of early modern warfare—the wounds, the suffering and dislocation. It should also be acknowledged, of course, that some people clearly did well out of the war, and resentments about those vested interests also affected the post-war negotiation (just as they had informed the Self-Denying Ordinance).47 At the very least, the fighting introduced new players onto the political scene. The army and the Scots, for example, were now key partners to any peace settlement in England, as well as, to some extent, the navy. It was also now common for institutions of government such as quarter sessions, assizes, or borough corporations to take on a partisan complexion, or to be at the heart of partisan battles for control. Domination of London’s government, for example, had become the key to the pursuit of partisan politics. If the costs of the war, and the means by which it had been fought, raised the stakes for making peace, the political arguments made to persuade people to support this massive mobilization also created an important backdrop to the development of revolutionary politics. Firstly, mobilization had fostered radical institutional innovation, with some long-lasting effects and some short-term challenges to conventional political thinking. The administrative measures taken to win the war were of long-standing significance, particularly the fiscal transformation, which doubled the share of national income being taxed and created new forms of taxation and borrowing that were crucial to the later financial revolution.48 The great increase in state power in this arena was underpinned by measures of dubious legality and strained political arguments. Many saw in this new leviathan a roundhead tyranny far worse than the royal abuses they had set out to curb in 1640.49 The process of political mobilization led to other kinds of political radicalization. In the summer of 1642 parliament and the king had taken arguments about policy and constitutional principle to large audiences, in print and in battles for control of local institutions which could deliver control of the militia—assize and quarter sessions, grand juries, and, of course, the militias themselves (which had previously been celebrated as the harmonious expression of a county’s civic duty, but which were now the

michael j. Braddick   109 focus of partisan political battles).50 Before that fateful spring, petitioning had become common—rival partisan networks seeking to mobilize local opinion in order to intervene in national political debate. Agrarian and other disputes were inflected with party politics, or party politics were used as a reason to settle long-standing grievances one way or another.51 As the war escalated so too did the complexity of public argument about it. People ‘changed sides’ or repudiated causes they now saw as having taken a false turn, and in doing so fuelled the public debate about policy, the constitution, the nature of the true religion, and the means by which arguments about these things could possibly be resolved. Fundamentally different views about the limits of religious toleration and the nature and origins of sovereign power were thrashed out for an audience restricted only by access to the pamphlets. The possibility existed for new groups to seize the means of administrative and political mobilization in order to promote their own political ends—astrologers, clubmen, witch-hunters, and radicals of many stripes launched initiatives which sought to lend meaning, establish certainty, or pursue necessary reformation as a way out of the crisis. Lush political debate created many new opportunities for political speculation, and political action.52 One way of imposing order on this complex story is through taxonomies of political opinion. Much of the political history of the period has sought to define party positions and to follow their fortunes over time: royalist, neutral, and parliamentarian; peace and war party parliamentarian; presbyterian and independent; swordsmen and courtiers in royal counsels. There is of course plenty to be gained from taxonomizing political positions, but this chapter has been constructed on another principle: rather than plot allegiances I have put the process of mobilization at the heart of the politics. This helps to address a number of questions: the dynamism of civil war politics, the instability of the political alliances of the 1640s, and the relationship between popular and radical or revolutionary politics. It was the appeal to public audiences for support for incompatible views of the true religion and the constitution that created the space in which radically new answers could be developed. Revolutionary ideas were prompted, sharpened, and articulated in a political argument which had deliberately been take outside the institutions of government—the attempt to mobilize opinion outside those institutions in order to influence their workings had created the environment in which completely different kinds of politics could emerge.53 Emphasizing the mobilization of opinion offers another way of considering engagement with national issues, and contextualizes some forms of neutralism as active positions in relation to national politics. For example, the clubmen movements were not purely localist (their manifestos were published for a national audience) and they were in some cases responding both to the languages of national politics (appropriating them to local circumstance) and to particular developments on the national scene (such as the failure of the Uxbridge negotiations). In that sense then, this was a creative response to national politics, mobilized publicly, rather than an expression of a pure country rejection of national politics. In all sorts of ways local politics were inflected by national

110   War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646 politics—in disputes over forest bounds, enclosures, or fenland drainage, for example, or the politics of the depression in the cloth trade.54 The process of mobilization made a connection between popular, local, and national politics. Nonetheless, the strong emphasis placed on anti-war sentiment and neutralism in revisionist histories of the 1970s was an important one and should not be lost.55 Historians do well to remember that not everyone is necessarily interested in politics, or willing to go to war for their convictions. One way of reconciling this emphasis on mobilization with the taxonomy of allegiance is by considering how the dynamic of mobilization was revelatory for individuals—how it demonstrated to them what was malleable and what was not. Individuals might start in agreement but find that this process of self-examination took them in quite different directions: not just side changers like Cholmley or Dering, but one-time fellow travellers like Lilburne and Burton, or Lilburne and Cromwell.56 Abstracted from the complexity of these individual crises of conscience we can see clear lines of argument, but we might do better to think of them as developing political logics to which people might be drawn or repelled as they considered their own circumstances and in the light of their own experiences. And, of course, one such consideration might easily be self-interest: profit, love, advancement, or self-preservation. For some individuals, however, this experience of mobilization had laid bare or forced them to articulate political principles with revolutionary potential. The question for most contemporaries in the late 1640s was not, on the whole, ‘is the revolution worth it?’57 Instead they were asking what was necessary to extract England from this horror, and what was necessary to prevent a descent into this abyss for the future. For an increasingly powerful group this implied the necessity of fundamental religious and political reform, and the political conditions of post-war England afforded them the opportunity to act on their new-found certainties.

Notes 1. Austin Woolrych, an expert in both fields, is the outstanding exception. See Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002). For an account of how the military history of the period is taking fuller account of social and political history see Hopper’s chapter in this volume. 2. These events are covered in more detail in Cust’s chapter in this volume. 3. See the chapters by Peacey and Walter in this volume. For the feverish politics of these ‘December days’ see Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1978), chap. 4. 4. Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire:  A  New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 186. 5. This process is narrated by Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1995), 478–87. His account of the content of the paper war is contentious. 6. James S. Hart, Jr., ‘Rhetoric and Reality: Images of Parliament as a Great Council’, in Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (eds.), The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill (Cambridge, 2011), 74–95.

michael j. Braddick   111 7. Michael J. Mendle, ‘Politics and Political Thought’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973), 219–45; Mendle, ‘Parliamentary Sovereignty: A Very English Absolutism’, in Nicholas T. Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 97–119; Quentin Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, History Workshop Journal, 61.1 (2006): 156–70. See also Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, 2006), chap. 8. 8. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999); Manning, English People, chap. 3; John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–48 (Harlow, 1998), 53–4. Manning gives these political positions a class basis, an interpretation that is not widely accepted. 9. Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1985), chap. 11; Morrill, Revolt, 59–62. 10. Peter Young and Richard Holmes, The English Civil War: A Military History of the Three Civil Wars, 1642–1651 (London, 1974), chaps. 2, 4, 5. 11. Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War, 1642– 1646: Strategy and Tactics (Harlow, 2005), 12–13. For the navy see Bernard Capp, ‘Naval Operations’, in John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998), 156–91. 12. Ian Roy, ‘The Royalist Army in the First Civil War’, unpublished D.Phil. (Oxford, 1963), chap. 1; Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort 1642–1646, 2nd edition (London, 1999), chaps. 1–2. 13. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, chap. 4; Wanklyn and Jones, Military History, chaps. 4–5; Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War: Myth and Reality (Barnsley, 2006), chaps. 4–5. 14. David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994), 113–17. 15. For this and the following four paragraphs see Michael J. Braddick, ‘History, Reformation, Liberty and the Cause: Parliamentarian Military and Ideological Escalation in 1643’, in Braddick and Smith (eds.), Experience of Revolution, 117–34. 16. For the origins and spread of partisan language, expressed in simple binaries, see Tom Leng, ‘ “Citizens at the door”: Mobilising Against the Enemy in Civil War London’, Journal of Historical Sociology (forthcoming, 2015). 17. Michael J. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England: Local Administration and Response (Woodbridge, 1994), chaps. 3–4; Morrill, Revolt, 77–101. 18. Braddick, God’s Fury, 273–9. 19. Braddick, God’s Fury, 282–5. 20. Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974), chap. 3, esp. 63–7; Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553–1682 (Woodbridge, 2005). 21. Roy, ‘Royalist Army’, chap. 1; Hutton, Royalist War Effort, chap. 8. 22. David Scott, ‘Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642–9’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), 36–60; Anthony Milton, ‘Anglicanism and Royalism in the 1640s’, in Adamson (ed.), English Civil War, 61–81; Milton, ‘Sacrilege and Compromise: Court Divines and the King’s Conscience, 1642–1649’, in Braddick and Smith (eds.), Experience of Revolution, 135–53. See, more generally, Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2007).

112   War and Politics in England and Wales, 1642–1646 23. Young and Holmes, English Civil War, chaps. 6–10; P. R. Newman, Atlas of the English Civil War (London, 1985), maps 6–13. 24. Wanklyn and Jones, Military History, 92–4. 25. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 268–73. 26. Scott, ‘Royalist Politics’, 47–50. 27. Wanklyn and Jones, Military History, 15–16; Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (London, 2005), 61–5; Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the English Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (London, 1992), 204–6. 28. Roy, ‘Royalist Army’, chap. 3; Hutton, Royalist War Effort, 92–4. 29. Wanklyn and Jones, Military History, 15. 30. For the following three paragraphs see Young and Holmes, English Civil War, chaps. 12–16; Newman, Atlas, maps 14–28; Wanklyn and Jones, Military History, chaps. 14–18. 31. For Montrose see Edward J. Cowan, Montrose: For Covenant and King (London, 1977). 32. Robert Ashton, ‘From Cavalier to Roundhead Tyranny, 1642–9’, in John Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649 (Basingstoke, 1982), 185–207; Morrill, Revolt, chap. 3. 33. Quoted in Braddick, God’s Fury, 334. See also Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 290–1. 34. Braddick, God’s Fury, 337–47. 35. Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); Elliot Vernon, ‘A Ministry of the Gospel:  The Presbyterians during the English Revolution’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1999). 36. Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), chap. 2; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), chap. 1; John Adamson, ‘The Baronial Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 40 (1990): 93–120, at 105–19. 37. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 301–6. 38. Gentles, New Model Army, chap. 4. 39. Gentles, New Model Army, 31–2; Kishlansky, New Model Army, chap. 2. 40. Smith, Constitutional Royalism, 121–4. 41. Gentles, New Model Army, 55–60; Wanklyn, Decisive Battles, chaps. 14–15. 42. Joad Raymond, ‘Popular Representations of Charles I’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge, 1999), 47–73, at 56–60. 43. Gentles, New Model Army, chap. 3; David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973), chaps. 5–6. For the clubmen see Braddick, God’s Fury, 413–21, and the works cited there. 44. Roy, ‘Royalist Army’, 134–43, 198–206. 45. Roy, ‘Royalist Army’, 138–9; Underdown, Somerset, 86–92. See, in general, Ann Hughes, ‘The King, the Parliament and the Localities during the English Civil War’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985): 236–63. 46. Scott, ‘Royalist Politics’, esp. 54–7; Milton, ‘Anglicanism and Royalism’, esp. 75–9. 47. Carlton, Going to the Wars; Stephen Porter, Destruction in the English Civil Wars (Gloucester, 1994); Braddick, God’s Fury, chap. 14. 48. Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, c.1558–1714 (Manchester, 1996); James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Stroud, 1999); D’Maris Coffman, ‘Towards a New Jerusalem: The Committee for Regulating the Excise, 1649–1653’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013): 1418–1450.

michael j. Braddick   113 49. Ashton, ‘Cavalier to Roundhead Tyranny’. 50. Fletcher, Outbreak, chaps. 11–12; Michael J. Braddick, ‘Prayer Book and Protestation: AntiPopery, Anti-Puritanism and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, in Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds.), England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited (Farnham, 2011), 125–45. 51. David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, 2000); Walter, Understanding Popular Violence; Walter chapter in this volume. 52. Braddick, God’s Fury, chaps. 15–16. 53. Michael J. Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), 175–93. 54. For some examples see Braddick, God’s Fury, 184–5, 230–6, 413–26. 55. See the comments by Hutton, Royalist War Effort, xv–xvii. 56. For the general phenomenon see Andrew Hopper, Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012). 57. Paraphrasing the question posed by Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (Harlow, 2007), 433.

Further Reading Braddick, Michael, God’s Fury, England’s Fire:  A  New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008). Braddick, Michael J., ‘Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), 175–193. Gentles, Ian, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992). Hutton, Ronald, The Royalist War Effort 1642–1646, 2nd edition (London, 1999). Kishlansky, Mark A., The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979). Milton, Anthony, ‘Anglicanism and Royalism in the 1640s’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), 61–81. Roy, Ian, ‘The Royalist Army in the First Civil War’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford (1963). Scott, David, ‘Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642–9’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), 36–60. Wanklyn, Malcolm and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War, 1642–1646: Strategy and Tactics (Harlow, 2005). Woolrych, Austin, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002). Young, Peter and Richard Holmes, The English Civil War: A Military History of the Three Civil Wars 1642–1651 (Ware, 2000).

Chapter 7

S c ot tish P ol i t i c s , 164 4 –165 1 Laura A. M. Stewart

Scotland in the Later 1640s: ‘Down-hill all the Way’? In January 1644, a Scottish army crossed the River Tweed and invaded England. What made this moment remarkable was that the Scots had been invited to do so by the English. A group of parliamentarians, led by John Pym, negotiated an alliance with the ostensibly neutral Scots in order to bring them into a war that King Charles I seemed to be winning. The treaty, known as the Solemn League and Covenant, provided the English parliament with over 20,000 Scottish troops. For as long as this army was active on English soil, its pay and expenses would be met by the English parliament. In addition, the Scots were promised ‘the reformation of religion in the kingdoms of England and Ireland’. Making the English and Irish churches more like their own was, for the Scots, the obvious way to ensure the safety of the true reformed faith in its presbyterian incarnation. The advocacy of reform ‘according to the Word of God’ and by ‘the example of the best reformed Churches’, plus an explicit condemnation of episcopacy, implied that the English would seek to create a presbyterian church but avoided commitments (and disagreements) on specifics.1 It was a good deal for the Scottish Covenanters. Now their army had to make sure that the English kept to its terms. The army of the Solemn League probably represented the largest concentration of foreign nationals to be found in England at any time during the seventeenth century. Some of the most stimulating recent work on this period has been generated by those historians, notably Mark Stoyle and David Scott, who have considered the impact of the Scottish presence on England’s society and culture as well as its politics. In general terms, however, British approaches have often told us more about what the Scots were doing (or failing to do) in England than what was happening back in Scotland. This is not surprising. As David Scott has rightly pointed out, England was the seat of the British king’s

laura a. m. Stewart   115 government and the most powerful of his kingdoms. An Anglocentric narrative for the British civil wars may simply be unavoidable.2 Allan Macinnes has attempted to counter this view by depicting the ‘British revolution’ from a Scottish perspective. Although Macinnes’s work offers a valuable reinterpretation of the period, it could be argued that his thesis confirms Scott’s point. If there was a ‘Scottish moment’ in British politics between 1638 and 1645, what happened after that date?3 We return to a familiar story: the Scots found themselves relegated to the second division as the New Model Army powered up the archipelagic league table, besting all comers (plus the Dutch) in the process. Important recent studies have nuanced our understanding of Anglo-Scottish relations, but there are questions about Scotland’s wars that do not necessarily benefit from a ‘British’ approach and they cannot all be asked, let alone answered, here. This chapter reconsiders Scottish politics during the later 1640s. Its focus will be the governing and representative bodies through which decision-making processes were conducted and experienced. From 1639, the Scottish body politic was given voice by the three estates, which had been reconstituted after the expulsion of the clerical elite as the nobility, barons (or lairds), and burgesses. The estates met either in full parliament or in a smaller, theoretically less authoritative assembly, known as a convention. An executive council, called the committee of estates, made day-to-day decisions, effectively replacing the king’s emasculated privy council. Although these bodies were unicameral, the estates also deliberated separately. A parallel set of structures, headed by the General Assembly, governed the remodelled presbyterian church, or kirk. Although the kirk played a key political role in Covenanted Scotland, there is currently no satisfactory modern study to which students and scholars can be referred. Likewise, the near-total absence of research into popular, crowd, community, local, gendered, or subaltern politics in seventeenthcentury Scotland are major lacunae that cannot be filled here.4 In the early years of the Covenanting period, stools were thrown at the heads of bishops, people protested on the streets, and emotionally charged mass swearings of the Covenant were held across the country. An English army was seen off—twice—and a British king was humbled. The second half of the 1640s, by contrast, has been depicted as ‘down-hill all the way’ even by those who rightly refuse to see Oliver Cromwell’s shadow lying across the Solemn League.5 This chapter will suggest that the Covenanters should not simply be dismissed as a spent force after 1644. Intervention in England did not enable the Scottish political elite to engineer a lasting peace settlement on its own terms or keep war beyond Scotland’s borders. Nonetheless, the Covenanters escaped both destruction at the hands of royalist insurgents within Scotland and defeat in England. They retained control over the army’s exit strategy from England in 1647 and executed it with sufficient skill to ensure the survival of Covenanted government. During 1647, Scotland’s leading politicians struggled with the fact that, by bringing the army home, they had relinquished the obvious direct means of exerting pressure in England. When the king was unexpectedly seized by the New Model Army in June 1647, it seemed that everything the Covenanters had achieved, and at such a very high price, was now under threat. Subsequent attempts to regain control of the British diplomatic agenda have usually been described in terms of a struggle between conservatives

116   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 and radicals.6 This polarity implies that tensions within the Covenanted body politic were always irreconcilable. Despite bitter divisions among political elites, however, Covenanting government remained vigorous and viable. Covenanted Scotland was far from ready to fall on Oliver Cromwell’s sword in 1650.

Politics and Politicians in the Civil War Era Scottish government in the early seventeenth century was highly decentralized. Control over a patchwork of local structures was predominantly in the hands of a semi-autonomous landed elite, whose interest in them was, more often than not, hereditary. Royal government could do little in the localities except through the mediation of a largely unaccountable landed elite. Covenanter government sought, from the beginning, to bypass royal officials and create its own centrally directed network of agencies. At the centre, the committee of estates acted as the coordinator of these new structures. During the war years, the executive divided in two, with one half remaining in Edinburgh while the other followed the army into England. As its workload expanded, the committee farmed out particular tasks to a range of sub-committees with flexible remits. The entire network, all historians agree, demanded the participation of an unprecedented number of people from a wider cross-section of landed and mercantile society. ‘Oligarchic centralism’, according to Macinnes, allowed power to become concentrated in the hands of a dominant few. It did not deliver total control and the extent of local discretion, in particular, probably remained considerable.7 Although the British civil wars had a Scottish dimension, Scotland’s royalists were never able to establish a powerbase to rival the Covenanter capital at Edinburgh. By the autumn of 1641, anyone who wanted to attend parliament, acquire a clerical living, or hold any government office, had to sign the Covenant. Retreat to the splendid isolation of the family seat offered few consolations as it became harder to avoid the attentions of local committees equipped with lists of the politically unsound. There were royalists, who did resist, but they lacked the ideological unity and coherence of the Covenanting elite. The association of some key figures with Catholicism—George Gordon, 2nd marquis of Huntly, led a family that had traditionally remained loyal to the Catholic faith, while others such as Robert Maxwell, 1st earl of Nithsdale, were active adherents—further tainted the royalist cause. The erstwhile Covenanter, James Graham, marquis of Montrose, and his Irish commander, Alasdair MacColla, launched a campaign in 1644 that sought to restore the Anglo-Britannic status quo ante bellum. This implied both the sacrifice of Scotland’s hard-won semi-autonomous status within a reconfigured regal union and the overthrow of the Presbyterian church. Montrose’s reliance on Irish Catholics and Gaelic-speaking clansmen further alienated potential supporters, but the fact that he had to call on them at all was symptomatic of the limited appeal of his agenda in much of the Lowlands.

laura a. m. Stewart   117 The successful negotiation of a favourable treaty with England in 1643 confirmed the dominance of a parliamentary grouping centred on four noblemen, Archibald Campbell, 1st marquis of Argyll, his distant kinsman and chancellor of Scotland, John Campbell, 1st earl of Loudoun, John Elphinstone, 2nd Lord Balmerino, and John Kennedy, 6th earl of Cassillis. Key allies included the respected co-architects of the National Covenant, the lawyer Archibald Johnstone of Wariston, and the cleric Alexander Henderson. Supporters of the king who had been prepared to accept the Covenanted constitution affirmed by Charles in November 1641, notably James, 3rd marquis and 1st duke of Hamilton, and his brother, William, 1st earl of Lanark (later 2nd duke of Hamilton), baulked at the Solemn League and initially resisted signing it. Charles’s imprudent decision to detain Hamilton in Pendennis Castle, Cornwall, on suspicion of fomenting war between king and subjects, drove Lanark back into the welcoming arms of his Covenanted countrymen. Argyll has been justifiably depicted as the dominant figure throughout these years. Yet Cassillis, Balmerino, and Loudoun, although lacking his vast personal resources, were influential men in their own right whose advocacy of the cause predated Argyll’s. All of them had to contend with the presence of substantial politicians, notably Lanark, who believed that they could do the king best service through legitimate channels and from within government. Charles, unfortunately, often failed to recognize this. The inclusion of the likes of Lanark was actively sought by the Covenanting elite and reflects the extent to which principles of unity, consensus, and consultation were far from mere rhetorical devices. Scottish politics was not a one-man show. Argyll’s grouping was once regarded by historians as an increasingly isolated faction of extremists, whose repeated failures convinced them that hordes of ‘malignants’ and ‘delinquents’ were undermining the cause from within. Purgation of the political nation was required; the 1646 Act of Classes supposedly began a process that culminated in the rule of a theocratically inclined ‘Kirk Party’ after September 1648. Recent work has rightly rejected the anachronistic labelling of Argyll’s grouping as a coherent ‘party’ led by religious fanatics. By contrast, the Act of Classes continues to be seen as a radical piece of socio-political engineering, which seriously threatened, perhaps for the first time, the pre-eminence of the titled nobility. Passed by parliament in January 1646, then reframed with more severe penalties in January 1649, the Act categorized political malefactors according to the severity of their fault against ‘God and this kingdome’.8 As will be discussed below, however, the terms of the 1646 Act suggest that its taxonomy was not solely designed with punishment in mind. Re-admittance to the body politic was explicitly compassed in the same way that any moral transgressor, having made public repentance in his or her parish church, rejoined the fellowship of the congregation. Historians have emphasized the punitive nature of the Act at the expense of its redemptive aspect and thereby missed the opportunities it gave for sinners to return to the Covenanted fold. Displays of contrition, especially in public, do not come easily to the powerful. The kirk’s predilection for pressing great men onto their knees has been seen as emblematic of the factors that made an alliance between church and nobility seem ‘unnatural’.

118   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 Yet elites often embraced the role of godly magistrate during the reformation century, as both a virtuous ideal and a means of reinforcing their social power.9 The potency of the Covenant was derived, at least in part, from its fusion of the godly nation with the traditional political ideals of the commonweal. The result was an alliance between a muscular centralizing government and a national church committed to a second reformation. It implied that the civil sword should be wielded in accord with, and never in contradiction to, the church’s decrees. Consequently, support from the kirk came on a strictly conditional basis and woe betide secular governors if they failed to satisfy the guardians of Scotland’s collective public conscience.10 The Engagement, agreed between three Scottish noblemen and Charles I in December 1647, was lambasted as ‘contrary to the Word of God’ by clerics who now threatened to break that alliance. Thereafter, the Engagers took control of the secular organs of central government, while the clerical elite used a formidable organizational network of pulpits and local church courts to back the anti-Engagers. Nonetheless, we will see that the Engagement crisis should not be understood simply in terms of a struggle between ‘church’ and ‘state’. Indeed, it was the possibilities offered by the Engagement for reconciling Covenanting principles with the king’s interest that may have convinced parliamentarians to support an otherwise risky venture. The anti-Engagers, restored to power in the autumn of 1648, tried to achieve something similar when Charles I’s execution presented them with an opportunity to establish a Covenanted British monarchy.

The Contours of the Political Landscape The signing of the Solemn League forced Scottish politicians to think hard about where the balance lay between the defence of true religion and the maintenance of the king’s authority. ‘Kirk’ and ‘king’ have tended to be presented as two fixed poles on the Scottish political spectrum, around which ‘radicals’ and ‘conservatives’ clustered. In 1643, it has been argued, ‘radicals’ won the argument, leaving the ‘conservative’ coalition in ‘disarray’; radical control over the machinery of government remained unchallenged until the Engagement crisis of 1648.11 A slightly different interpretation sees a ‘radical mainstream’ cohering around a revolutionary set of progressive political and constitutional principles, which drew on a religious ‘language’, rather than religious conviction, to secure support. These principles were consistently maintained by the mainstream, except for a brief period when ‘conservative elements’ mounted an aristocratic reaction and secured the Engagement with the king.12 While the idea of a ‘radical mainstream’ usefully emphasizes essential continuities of leadership, it has the less desirable effect of fixing and homogenizing political opinion. The Solemn Leaguers had to share space with people who sought, in some measure, to defend the king’s interests. What does this tell us about how political alignments formed

laura a. m. Stewart   119 and were sustained? For Stevenson, no such analysis was required because ‘the deference of a hierarchical society’ guaranteed the acquiescence of a largely passive people to the disastrous policies promoted by noble and clerical leaders. An important corrective to this interpretation has been put forward by John Young. In a painstaking deconstruction of voting patterns and attendance records, Young sought to demonstrate that Argyll’s grouping prevailed because its superior management techniques were directed at harnessing the innate political radicalism of the burgesses and gentry. The Scottish parliament, as it was reconstituted after 1639, apparently shifted power away from the nobility towards the lairds and burgesses. Argyll’s brilliance therefore lay in his ability to recognize this fact and manage the radical agenda in his own interests.13 Young’s thought-provoking thesis draws on difficult evidence that can support more than one interpretation. Membership and attendance records (sederunts) are relatively plentiful, so we often know who was on which committee and attended which meeting. Voting records are rare. Decisions, not deliberations, were written up in the official record. Mushrooming government committees certainly required ever more people to staff them but, while nobles gravitated towards the major decision-making bodies, the more tedious, labour-intensive tasks were left to lesser beings. Financial and administrative sub-committees, with their limited powers and crippling workloads, seem unlikely springboards for a revolution. Moreover, with such limited information about how people behaved once the meeting room doors were closed, it is unclear what, exactly, lairds and burgesses were doing with their new-found influence. No major political decision was taken without endorsement from a leading noble. No significant parliamentary alignment formed around a laird or burgess. No military leader emerged to challenge the power of an Argyll or Hamilton:  Lieutenant-General David Leslie’s parallel was more Sir Thomas Fairfax than Oliver Cromwell.14 Closer study of Covenanting government may show that the hierarchies of the locality exerted as much influence on political alignments as horizontal affinities within each estate. Elites who stood aloof from government risked exposing themselves and their family, kin, and friends, to unsympathetic treatment from their Covenanted neighbours, while those who participated could protect their own. An example from Aberdeenshire is perhaps instructive. In the mid-1640s, the north-east saw intensive government activity, as a revivified regime sought to reassert control over the region from whence hailed not only Montrose, but also the marquis of Huntly. The power of the Gordons continued to impose a ceiling on the ambitions of ancient titled families, such as the Forbeses and Frasers, who led extensive—and generally Protestant—kin groups. At the forefront of energetic efforts to levy fines on the regime’s enemies and secure compensation for those who had suffered at their hands were two stalwart Covenanters, Andrew, Lord Fraser and Sir William Forbes of Craigievar. Their names headed a petition to parliament in 1644, which asked that ‘malignantes in the north and ther adherentes’ be the ones to pay for their neighbours’ losses. Commissions for investigating losses and compensation claims were duly granted to a plethora of Forbeses and Frasers. The government’s assurances that ‘no encouragements sall be wanting to any of such approvin fidelitie and affectioun’ as Lord Fraser also held good. He was granted tax rebates, exemptions

120   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 from quartering, and permission to compensate himself handsomely from the revenues belonging to his rebellious near-neighbour, Sir Alexander Irvine of Drum.15 The exact contours of the local political landscape must have varied greatly. Kin and clan loyalties added a distinctive element in the north and west, but may have been of less significance in the more fertile, commercialized, and urbanized regions of the south and east. Scotland’s fifty-plus royal burghs (which were set apart from other towns by their extensive economic and political privileges), formed a parliamentary estate, but individual burghs had their own interests and there were disagreements, especially over the tax burden. The ways in which localized relationships and concerns fed into political alignments at the centre remains poorly understood. Argyll’s power, for example, had much to do with the fact that he could command several thousand kinsmen, yet they were of limited use as he navigated his way around the crowded interior of Edinburgh’s parliament house. To some extent, Argyll’s pre-eminence became self-reinforcing when the many favours this placed in his gift attracted people to him. The Edinburgh merchant, Sir John Smith of Grothill, must have been involved in negotiating both the Solemn League in 1643 and the treaty with Charles II in 1650 because he was backed by Argyll. A nobleman’s influence had its limitations, however, reminding us that relations between patrons, clients, and the communities they came from, were reciprocal. Argyll was not able to protect Smith from public humiliation when he was accused of collaborating with Montrose (by releasing some of his men from Edinburgh’s gaol in 1645). Edinburgh’s governing elite may also have delivered a very pointed rebuff when Argyll sought to have its provost de-selected in 1647: he was duly confirmed in post for another year.16 Direct evidence for Smith’s allegiances mentions not nobles, but the clergy. The role of the pulpit in shaping the political culture of Covenanted Scotland was surely of immense importance, yet historians know little about a national church that, almost uniquely in early modern Europe, successfully rejected episcopacy and Erastianism. Although John Coffey’s biography of Samuel Rutherford has begun the rehabilitation of the Covenanted clergy, little attention has been given to the social, cultural, and political significance of the church in which they served. The presbyterian kirk continues to be portrayed as a political tool, through which a dominant ‘radical’ minority exercised control over a majority of ‘moderate’ brethren and, by implication, their congregations. This framework has restricted our understanding of the Covenanted mentalité. David Dickson was a respected biblical scholar, who led mass open-air services during the 1630s, coordinated resistance to the Prayer Book, and defended the contentious practice of family exercises (bible study in private homes). Past form should have placed Dickson with the Protesters and Remonstrants who, from 1649, rejected compromise with Charles II and those who had supported his father. Although he joined the ranks of the Resolutioners, who acknowledged the king’s temporal authority, he was no more willing to accept royal supremacy in the church than his putatively more ‘radical’ colleagues. If the mind of a prominent scholar like Dickson remains mysterious to us, what of the rest of Scotland’s 900 or so, largely anonymous, parish ministers? How were their views influenced by both the lay elders who held formal positions in the kirk hierarchy and the congregation as a whole? The kirk, as it described itself, was emphatically not just the clergy. Our

laura a. m. Stewart   121 understanding of the relationship between church and political nation, and between ministers and their flocks, is clearly in need of considerable refinement.

Reconciling King and Covenant: Scottish Involvement in the English Civil Wars Between 1644 and 1647, Scotland endured the Montrose–MacColla rising, terrible outbreaks of plague, and the burden of supporting armies that seemed intractably bogged down in England and Ireland. Intervention in the wars of sister-kingdoms had been predicated on the assumption that, through the deployment of force, the Scottish government would secure a permanent archipelagic settlement largely on its own terms. This was not achieved. Exaggerated hopes that the Scottish army would deliver a knock-out blow against the royalists had dissipated by the end of 1644 and it was now the focus of growing, and increasingly well-organized, criticism by its paymasters. If any Scots were calling for the army to cut its losses and get out of England, the Covenanting leadership proved adept at suppressing such talk. Mistrust of the king’s intentions and disgust at what his lieutenants were doing in his name undoubtedly undermined the royalist cause and, with this in mind, it is not surprising that approaches to the Covenanting high command came to nothing. Fearing, nonetheless, that divisions at the top would undermine their diplomatic efforts in London, the Scottish commissioners wrote in uncompromising terms to their colleagues to remind them what was at stake: For if wee shalbe divided and rent asunder by parties and factions amongst ourselves, what can be expected but desolation at home, disreputation abroad, losse of all confidence heere, and—which is most of all and more to be regarded then our lives, liberties, or what is dearest to us on earth—the hazard of the cause itself . . .

Meanwhile, the royalist rising in Scotland threatened to sweep the Covenanters from power. The commissioners in London looked on in horror as their ‘disnatured’ countrymen fomented an ‘unnatural’ war against the defenders of the Covenant. In the seventeenth century, ‘natural’ was sometimes used to mean ‘native of ’, thereby stemming it from the same Latin root, nasci (meaning ‘to be born’) as ‘nation’.17 Without detracting from the dynamic leadership provided by Montrose and MacColla, the refusal of the Solemn Leaguers to pull troops out of England until it was almost too late goes some way to explaining why such a poorly resourced, unpopular army came so close to seizing control of the country. This was a particularly dangerous time for Argyll. Determined to defend his lands in person from the many enemies descending upon them, Argyll achieved little more than the exposure of his own shortcomings as a general. Fortunately, Argyll was able to call on a real soldier to mop up after him. David Leslie’s disciplined, battle-hardened army roared over the border on 7 September 1645. Within the week, the

122   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 enemy had been located at Philiphaugh, near Selkirk, where Leslie’s men exacted a merciless revenge on both Montrose’s men and their female camp followers. With the royalists in retreat, Covenanting government vigorously reasserted itself through exhaustive investigations into collaborations with the enemy. Reams of paper were produced by the process of preparing cases, taking witness statements, identifying the guilty, classifying their level of culpability, fining them, and hearing appeals. With the exception of four individuals singled out by parliament to give their own blood in lieu of Montrose’s—he was exiled instead—the regime expressed a preference for pecuniary rather than physical punishments. It was all very unpleasant, but the interminable investigations had an important rationale. By blaming the weakness of individuals, who were then given opportunities to repent and redeem themselves, the government preserved the integrity of the larger project and protected it from censure. The royalist rising did not topple the Covenanters in Scotland, but it did undermine their military effectiveness in England. By the end of 1645, it was widely felt that the Scots had outstayed their welcome and were draining precious resources from England’s parliamentary forces. When the king handed himself over to the Scots in May 1646, in the hope that he could divide the parliamentary allies and continue the war, calls for their eviction grew shrill. There were fears that, if the Scottish army did not leave voluntarily, Fairfax would be sent to hasten its departure.18 Charles, meanwhile, showed little interest in compromise. This made it impossible for his allies to convince Scottish parliamentarians that the king should be brought home to conclude a treaty. The duke of Hamilton, now back in Scotland, had been persuaded, apparently by Argyll, to take the Covenants and give his backing to the peace proposals then being offered to the king. There were heated debates in committee but, without credible assurances from the king regarding ‘the covenant and religion’, the Hamilton brothers had very little room for manoeuvre. In January 1647, parliament finally recalled the army. Charles was not invited to travel with it back to Scotland. Instead, the Covenanters demanded that they be allowed to retain a diplomatic presence in England and have a say in any future peace settlement. In addition, the English should maintain the current line of succession and ensure the safety of the king’s person. Although these ‘desires’ were, for the time being, unenforceable, the peaceful withdrawal of the army meant that Scotland retained a significant military capability. Several thousand Scottish troops were still active in Ireland. A future Scottish military intervention in England remained possible.19

The Covenants Tested: The Engagement Crisis and its Repercussions Although a peace treaty had eluded them, Argyll’s grouping could take comfort from the successful extrication of the Scottish army from a dangerous situation. The AngloScottish alliance, although threadbare, had not been destroyed, while the withdrawal

laura a. m. Stewart   123 of the much-resented Scottish army helped to strengthen the position of the English parliamentary presbyterians. Among Scotland’s clerical elite, there was inevitable disappointment that a full presbyterian settlement in England had not been realized. Historians are fond of quoting the cleric Robert Baillie’s disdain for the ‘lame Erastian Presbyterie’ with which the English seemed willing to content themselves. These were Baillie’s private sentiments, however, and contrast with his public pronouncements to the Scottish General Assembly. Much had been achieved, the erstwhile commissioner to the Westminster Assembly informed his colleagues in August 1647; the churches were ‘weell near one’.20 However, the British diplomatic scene had lately undergone an unsettling transformation that made England’s ‘Erastian Presbyterie’ look rather less ‘lame’ than Baillie had once thought. In June, the king had been taken into the custody of the English New Model Army, which was dominated by religious independents. The Heads of Proposals, published in August, condemned the Covenant and posited the restoration of limited episcopacy in return for a measure of toleration. Such a settlement would have invalidated the justifications given for intervening, at great cost, in the English civil war, thereby destroying the credibility of the Solemn Leaguers. Yet any attempt by the Scots forcibly to thwart a settlement would be taken in England as a breach of the League. How was this intractable dilemma to be resolved? During the middle months of 1647, the Scottish government continued to seek the restoration of the king to his ‘throne dignitie and royall government’ on terms compatible with the Covenants.21 Mutual suspicions among all parties played to the king’s advantage. Lanark, Loudoun, and the Solemn Leaguer, John Maitland, 2nd earl of Lauderdale, were sent to England to negotiate with the king. Fearing that some form of resolution inimical to Scottish interests was imminent, the three noblemen signed an Engagement with Charles on 26 December 1647. The king was offered military assistance in return for parliamentary confirmation of the Covenants in both kingdoms. Charles was not personally required to take the Covenants and none would be pressed to do so against their consciences. Such lenient conditions had not been sanctioned by the committee of estates, but the fevered political atmosphere arguably permitted no further delays. London was under the control of Fairfax’s troops and presbyterians had been purged from its government. Elements in the army were now openly calling for the king to be put on trial. The Engagement has customarily been depicted as an aristocratic and conservative ‘counter-revolution’. By March 1648, the Hamilton interest had captured secular government, enabling it to begin raising an army. The radicals, led by Argyll and strongly supported by the kirk leadership, were forced out of government. A titanic struggle ensued between these two great magnates, who seemed to personify the division between ‘church’ and ‘state’ that historians once regarded as an axiom of Scottish early modern history.22 It is an appealingly dramatic narrative, given corroboration by the protagonists themselves. Thanks to John Scally’s discovery of a journal of the 1648 parliament, we know that Argyll and Hamilton met face-to-face to discuss whether the Engagement provided ‘sufficient secooritie’ for the Covenants. The positions of the two men proved irreconcilable.23

124   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 The cleavage was real, but the personalized nature of Scottish politics encouraged efforts to restore unity and consensus. Thomas Reade, secretary to the English commissioners who spent a fruitless spring in Edinburgh trying to block the Engagement, was baffled by the frequent comings and goings between men that ‘in publicque are quite oppositt’.24 Uncertainty, confusion, and the likely costs of finding oneself on the losing side also kept opinion and allegiances fluid. The dilemma for many may not have been whether the preservation of the king took precedence over that of the Covenants, but whether the preservation of the Covenants was more likely to be achieved by preserving this king. Even if the guarantees were flimsy, the Engagement seemed to offer a better chance of securing the Covenants than waiting for England’s presbyterians to seize the initiative from an army that had advocated the twin evils of episcopacy with liberty of conscience. As the Engager parliament explained, it was not possible for the Scots to be passive bystanders. Should the independents prevail in England, the ‘securitie’ of its neighbour would be imperilled just as, ‘in the prelaticall tymes’, the ‘gangreene’ infecting England had ‘spread throw the whole’. Anti-Engagers agreed. They, too, were convinced that independents like Oliver Cromwell posed a threat to ‘reformatioune and defence of religion’, and they had said so in the mid-1640s. To argue now for a rapprochement with independents in order to avoid war risked charges of hypocrisy. What, then, was the alternative? Baillie offered only this response: if the king would not sign the Covenants, the wisest Scots could do nothing except wait on God’s judgement.25 Hamilton’s advantage was that, regardless of its feasibility, the Engagement offered an active strategy for settling the archipelago on Scottish terms. It could never satisfy those politicians and clerics who had come to believe that the principal threat to ‘reformatioune and defence of religion’ was Charles I. Samuel Rutherford, elaborating beyond the National Covenant’s terse rehearsal of acts of parliament and General Assembly, essentially argued that kings existed to preserve true religion. When a king failed in this most fundamental duty, it therefore fell to ‘all the inferior judges and people’ to ‘care for their own souls’ and ‘defend in their way true religion’. Those who chose to recall that Charles had attempted, ten years previously, to ‘press a false and idolatrous worship upon them’ may have followed Rutherford’s logic and ‘presumed to have no king’. Did Argyll’s personal appeal to the House of Commons in June 1646 express a similar conviction that the relationship between God, monarch, and people was contractual? Scorning the idea that the Scots were ‘too much affected with the Kings Interest’, Argyll stated that ‘personal regard to him’ would never make the Scots ‘forget that common Rule, The Safety of the People is the Supreme Law’. Perhaps he was reassuring the Commons, in language it understood, that the Scottish people would not risk the destruction of their ‘safety’, the army, to save the king. He could also have been hinting that a king who refused to take the Covenant was himself a threat to the safety of the Scottish people.26 One king had consistently refused to accept the Covenant. The emergence of his heir, Prince Charles, as a political figure in his own right made possible the development of an alternative strategy. Gilbert Burnet, writing one generation’s remove from events, claimed that a third political grouping emerged early in 1648, whose aim was to

laura a. m. Stewart   125 use the prince as the means to reconcile king’s men with kirkmen. Such hopes coalesced around Lauderdale, who had opened dialogue with the prince in the hope that he would reunite the body politic behind the Engagement by giving assurances for the safety of the kirk. Lauderdale’s initiative bore fruit, but events were running ahead of him.27 While Lauderdale was on a ship somewhere in the Channel, cementing a relationship with the prince that would endure for thirty years, his fellow-Engagers were struggling to raise an army. Argyll and other anti-Engagers had walked out of government. They supported vocal, and sometimes violent, resistance to the levy by parish ministers and other elements within local communities. Raising the required forces was slow going; it was early July before Hamilton, with 20,000 under-resourced troops and their bickering commanders, crossed over the border. After Hamilton’s army was destroyed near Preston in August, the anti-Engagers moved out of their powerbase in the western shires to recapture central government. Civil war threatened. It was Oliver Cromwell who settled the affair by taking his forces into Scotland to reinstall the anti-Engagers in government. Open conflict had been averted, but Cromwell demanded stringent guarantees for English security that Argyll and his supporters were in no position to resist. On 5 October 1648, Cromwell complained to the committee of estates that England had been menaced by ‘the failing of the kingdom of Scotland in not suppressing malignants and incendiaries’. All such persons must now be identified and removed from positions of trust. If ‘the honest party’ forgot its obligations, the 4,000 English soldiers camped in and around Edinburgh were on hand to remind them.28 The purges of 1648 were more extensive than either the electoral manipulation used to secure the Covenant in 1638–9 or the targeted removal of royalist sympathizers from government in 1646. As well as resenting the intrusion of central agencies into their affairs, local governors were profoundly unsettled when a retrospective revocation of lawful government orders was used as a justification for removing people from office. In Linlithgow, about twenty miles west of Edinburgh, the council had elected itself, as normal, around Michaelmas (29 September), but was subsequently asked to give ‘an accompt’ of its proceedings. A new council was duly selected in December. Lewis Monteith and Thomas Hart were promoted as provost and one of the bailies respectively. They refused, unusually, to take up office. Given that both men had served on the pre- and post-Engagement councils, we may surmise that their actions were due, not to ideological scruples, but the perceived illegitimacy of the proceedings. Ultimately, Monteith and Hart agreed to ‘conforme to the electioun’. Linlithgow’s return to favour was signalled by the subsequent appointment of the burgh’s parliamentary commissioner, James Campbell, to the committee of estates. No doubt Linlithgow, like many other communities, felt it literally could not afford to find itself beyond the political pale. The order for the council to make ‘accompt’ of itself arrived around the same time as the burgh was preparing to petition parliament about ‘the great loss’ it had sustained when anti-Engager forces had been quartered there.29 Although the purging of parliamentary and committee members did not directly target the peerage, as the abolition of the English House of Lords would do in May 1649,

126   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 the rallying of many nobles behind the Engagement made them the obvious casualties. Action against the ‘lait unlaufull engagement’ was instigated by the reformed committee of estates in late September and given formal sanction when parliament convened in January 1649. As a result, only eighteen members of the peerage attended the new parliament: down two-thirds on its predecessor.30 Nobles with a personal place in parliament could send no other in their stead, but shires and burghs, as corporate entities, could adapt to the legislation by nominating politically acceptable people as their representatives. While the absence of so many nobles made the reformed regime more reliant on burgesses and lairds, Covenanting government had always been predicated on cooperation between men who, titled or not, were all ‘lesser magistrates’. Noble leadership was a given even in 1649. Hence, the most vigorous proponents of purging were noblemen who had been prominent in Covenanting government throughout the past decade: Argyll, who set the tone with a ‘verey long speiche’ against Engagers and malignants, Cassillis, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, and a repentant and rehabilitated Chancellor Loudoun. These were the men who had most to lose if Hamilton’s allies, and especially his brother, Lanark, regained the political initiative. Parliament’s unprecedented exclusionary measures aimed to prevent Lanark from mounting a second operation—and provoking a full-scale English invasion—to save not only his king, but also his brother. Hamilton, who had been captured by the English army after Preston, was executed only once the king was dead.31 The sight of the ‘lesser party’ making a faction of the greater may have been an eye-opener for Cromwell, but it was not the Covenanted way of doing politics.32 Unlike the English body purged by Colonel Thomas Pride, the 1649 Scottish parliament, although carefully managed, witnessed no slights to its authority at the hands of soldiers. Burgh and shire commissioners from all parts of the country attended, indicating the continued relevance of parliament as the representative of the body politic. And with issues of such enormous importance to debate, it is little wonder that attendance was high. While the fate of Charles I and negotiations with his son inevitably predominated, parliament did other things in 1649 that were arguably of more direct relevance to many members. Vindicated by events and with moral authority on its side, the presbyterian church leadership campaigned successfully for the long-desired statute abolishing lay patronage: a measure that affected every parish in the land. The legislative ‘assault on sin’, which covered drunkenness and sexual deviance as well as witchcraft, was not the exclusive work of churchmen and the role of local elites in pushing this agenda needs to be fully explored. Heavily taxed communities that had been devastated by war and plague, and were now coping with rocketing grain prices, faced a crisis in poor relief. They seized on the impending parliament to strengthen the largely toothless legislation enacted during James VI’s reign. Demands for a redistribution of the tax burden were another manifestation of recent political realignments. This was the first parliamentary challenge to the fiscal regime established since 1639, spearheaded by communities that had supported the anti-Engager coup and were now calling in favours. This was a busy, vigorous, and well-attended parliament, not a tyrannizing rump locked into ‘a terminal spiral of defeat’.33

laura a. m. Stewart   127

Regicide: The Scottish Response On 30 January 1649, the king of Britain was judicially executed by a clique of his English subjects. Whether the leaders of Scottish government did ‘all they could’ to preserve Charles’s life is addressed elsewhere in this volume, but a few words on the political context are appropriate here. It was almost certainly a widely held belief in Scotland that the Covenants had bound Scots and English alike to maintain the king’s authority, but many people were unsure what to do when the king himself refused to enter into the arrangement. Not only the Covenants, but also much of the language in which politics was expressed, implied that the relationship between king and subjects was contractual. What this meant, like the injunction to defend true religion, remained open to debate and subject to the tests of practical politics. When circumstances altered, as they did with breath-taking rapidity in the later 1640s, politicians had to remain flexible without compromising essential principles. As the king’s trial approached, Scottish parliamentarians tried to do just that. The commissioners in London were told on 9 January to prepare for a forced abdication and the possibility that Charles, at the eleventh hour, would sign the Covenants. Scotland was not ‘craving his majesty’s restitution to his government, he not having satisfied his kingdoms’ (my italics): the implication was that, should his majesty choose to give them satisfaction, they would crave his majesty’s restitution. All was not lost even if Charles was, one way or the other, detached from his regal title. He had a son. The prince’s responsivenes to the overtures made by Lauderdale the previous spring had encouraged even leading kirkmen to think that they might succeed with a future king where they had failed with the current one. The English parliament was duly warned not to take any action ‘against the monarchical government of the kingdoms in the person of the prince or the king’s posterity’.34 It was not the Rump of the Long Parliament’s approval of Charles I’s execution that broke the British composite monarchy, but its decision, over three months later, to declare itself a republic. The Scottish parliament opted to reject what amounted to a grant of independence imposed unilaterally upon it, without its consent, by a regime it considered illegitimate.35 Monarchic authority was intrinsic to the Covenants. By acknowledging this principle, the Covenanters had carried the body politic with them for most of the decade. Whether the Covenants obligated or allowed the swearer to defend the authority of a king who was not himself Covenanted had later become a major cause of confusion and disagreement. Charles I’s death opened a path out of this dilemma. The Scottish parliament asserted that ‘all the subjects of this kingdome are bound humblie and faithfullie to obey, maintayne and defend’ the prince as their ‘only righteous soveraigne lord and king’. The sting was that Charles II would not be admitted to ‘the exercise of his royall dignitie’ until he had bound himself to God and the subjects of his kingdom by signing the Covenants.36 The son would embrace what the father had rejected and, however reluctantly and disingenuously he did it, this is ultimately what the Covenanters achieved in June 1650.

128   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 For that large body of nobles who had been excluded from power after September 1648, not to mention the smaller body of royalists who had been pariahs from an earlier date, Charles I’s death signposted a route back into government. Had the antiEngagers not proclaimed Charles II, their opponents would certainly have sought to do so instead, and without conditions. Charles II, meanwhile, could not have rested content as king of Scots. If his subjects had mistakenly chosen to call him by anything other than the title he believed was his by right, this would not have stopped the king of Britain viewing his northern kingdom as a launch-pad to reclaim his southern one. The result would have been the Scottish civil war that all serious politicians had strived to avoid throughout the 1640s. Even if the anti-Engagers had prevailed, it would have been a pyrrhic victory: the defeat of a royal army containing friends, family, and neighbours, and possibly the king himself, would have destroyed whatever vestiges of legitimacy the Covenanting cause possessed. On 5 February 1649, the Scottish government made a sensible decision. It declared Charles as king of Britain. At that moment, England was not yet a ‘free commonwealth’. A regicidal regime that did not even know what to call itself cannot have inspired confidence in its survival. Scottish government was formed of the same institutions, and staffed largely by the same people, as it had been ten years previously. Of all the possible futures God was thought to have in mind for the peoples of Scotland in the spring of 1649, the conquest of their country by the regicide, Oliver Cromwell, must have seemed among the least likely. The declaration of Charles II did not lead directly and inevitably to the conquest of Scotland by the New Model Army.

Invasion and Conquest The decision to declare the monarch made political sense but there was a problem: the second Charles was no more enthusiastic about life as a Covenanted king than the first had been. Initial negotiations, conducted at The Hague during the spring of 1649, did not go well for the Scottish commissioners. Among the factions politicking energetically around the new king, the commissioners found erstwhile allies such as Montrose, Lanark (2nd duke of Hamilton since his brother’s execution), and Lauderdale. Montrose, in particular, was seen to be in good standing with the king, who later authorized him to mount another invasion of Scotland. There were also hopes that, if a royalist coalition headed by James Butler, 1st marquis of Ormond, could seize control of Dublin, Ireland would provide Charles with the resources he needed to regain his British throne. With these other, more attractive, suits still in play, Charles could afford to offer terms that were even less advantageous to the Covenanters than those contained in the 1647 Engagement. The Scottish commissioners returned home empty-handed. While the English regime remained preoccupied with Ireland, the main threat to Covenanted Scotland came from royalists. Existing tensions in the far north formed the backdrop to a rising launched in February 1649 by Sir Thomas Mackenzie of Pluscardine

laura a. m. Stewart   129 (brother of the clan chief, George, 2nd earl of Seaforth), against which the Edinburgh government was taking precautions even before its eponymous protagonist seems to have known what he was doing. Montrose’s enterprise commenced only in March 1650, to allow time to recruit soldiers in northern Europe. Although compromised from the beginning by the king’s decision to reopen negotiations with the Covenanters, Montrose’s campaign, like Pluscardine’s, failed for largely the same reasons that had always beleaguered oppositional royalists: leaders fell out among themselves, they lacked clear strategic objectives, and their troops were badly resourced (although David Leslie also had troubles in this regard.) Montrose himself, given his former transgressions, cannot have expected leniency after his defeat and capture at Carbisdale (Rossshire) in April. Within the month, he had been executed. The manner of Montrose’s death reflected something more than a pragmatic need to prevent the survival of such a dangerous person becoming one of Charles’s negotiating terms. Montrose’s unusually violent military style, characteristic of the hired mercenary rather than the nobleman, may have been regarded as a betrayal, not only of Covenant and country, but also of the values of aristocratic society. A year earlier, Montrose’s unreliable ally, Huntly, had achieved the unenviable distinction of becoming the first peer to be judicially executed by the Covenanters. Huntly was offered the more dignified, less terrible death by beheading; Montrose was hanged like a common criminal and his body parts cut up for display in the leading burghs of the kingdom.37 By the time that a ship carrying the as-yet uncovenanted king appeared in the Moray Firth, Ireland had been decisively brought under English military control, the English parliament had resolved to send an army against Scotland, and there was little prospect of assistance from other war-weary monarchic states. William, prince of Orange, who was keen to say goodbye to an expensive guest, reputedly advised his brother-in-law to regard the Covenants as the price of Scotland, just as Charles’s grandfather, Henri IV, had deemed France worthy of a Mass.38 The regrets expressed by the men who, on 23 June 1650, witnessed Charles grudgingly put his signature to the Covenants, reflected their sense of having won ‘a hollow victory’.39 Charles I’s principled refusal to take the Covenant had, somewhat ironically, reinforced the Covenant’s unique status; his son, by conspicuously regarding it as he would any other set of terms presented from subjects to kings—binding only insofar as necessity dictated—dealt its credibility a heavy blow. Having taken the Covenants, Charles could not realistically be denied the exercise of government and this was duly declared by parliament on 4 July. Yet a king who had demonstrated his insincerity was surely no more fit for a place of public trust than anyone else found guilty of breaching the Covenants. Back in January, the government had issued a Declaration (in response to one issued, through a London press, by Montrose), which had implicitly likened Charles to the biblical King Jehoshaphat of Judah. Having ignored the warnings of the Lord’s prophet and supported a war of conquest, Jehoshaphat and his kingdom had been duly punished: ‘Shouldst thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord, therefore is wrath upon thee from before the Lord.’40 Some Scots now feared that Charles/Jehoshaphat would bring God’s vengeance down upon all of them.

130   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 The appearance of a Covenanted king on Scottish soil did not, as the commissioners hoped, heal the fissures in the body politic. It cracked them open. Charles’s behaviour generated a justifiable fear that he was bent on abandoning the Covenants at the first opportunity. As a precautionary measure, lest the king and his supporters attempt to use the army to overthrow the government, some politicians insisted that it be thoroughly purged. This deeply offended Leslie, who resented the insult to his personal authority as well as the slur it put upon hitherto unimpeachably loyal troops. Others had come to the conclusion that only a truly godly army could prevail against Scotland’s many enemies. In response, an alternative force, known as the Western Association, was formed. The Association was no lover of the English or independency, but some of its representatives, including Archibald Johnstone of Wariston, almost certainly contemplated sacrificing Charles to save their Covenanted country from destruction. Meetings between the Association and English commanders, reported in English newsletters, probably served only to confirm, on one side, that the Scottish people were deeply divided and, on the other, that the English were dreading the prospect of fighting a protestant people on their home turf.41 The very public splits in the Scottish body politic were easily and adeptly exploited by Cromwell through the medium of print. The king that Covenanters sought to defend, even at the price of ‘a perpetuall War’ with England, continued to maintain all his ‘Malignant and Popish hopes and confidences’. ‘There may be a Covenant made with death and hell’, suggested Cromwell, alluding to the doom-laden prophecies of Isaiah. ‘(I will not say yours was so). But judge if such things have a politick aime, to avoid the overflowing scourge, or to accomplish worldly interests.’ The Scots gave as good as they got. England, not Scotland, had broken the Covenant. ‘Wee take not upon us to judge yow in any thing otherwise then by your cariage and fruites. These we see and know to be bitter as wormewood and gall.’42 Cromwell’s words may have reinforced existing doubts, but they probably did not change many minds. There is little evidence that an English invader’s lectures on godliness attracted much favourable attention amongst the Scottish people. Cromwell’s expedition very nearly failed. His defeat of the Scottish army at Dunbar was terrible, in part, because it was unexpected. Leslie possessed the larger force and he knew his territory. Once on Scottish soil, Cromwell’s army was cut off from its supply lines and his troops quickly began to sicken and starve. By the early days of September, Leslie’s patient refusal to give battle had forced the New Model Army to turn back towards the border. Having blocked in his enemy at Doon Hill, near Dunbar, Leslie simply needed to select the right ground and moment to attack. On the evening of 2 September, Leslie allowed his men to stand down and move off the advantageous high ground. Seeing what was happening, the English high command seized the opportunity and, in the early hours of 3 September, went on the offensive. By the end of the day, up to 4,000 Scots were dead and 10,000 captured. What remained of the army retreated to Edinburgh. Leslie had made an error of judgement at a critical moment. Once battle was joined, the purges that contemporaries believed were the main cause of the disaster became

laura a. m. Stewart   131 significant, as untested recruits found themselves facing a more disciplined and experienced force.43 England’s superior resources probably did not matter very much until after Dunbar: once the English army controlled Scottish harbours it was able to access the supplies that, in the absence of a Scottish navy, could be shipped easily and securely up the east coast. This factor proved decisive, for it enabled Cromwell to sustain a large army over winter in hostile Scottish territory: a feat matched only by another master of logistics, King Edward I. At Dunbar, the English won a battle—albeit an important one—not a war. Cromwell’s worry was that his army’s morale, and his own health, might break before the Scots could be winkled out from behind Leslie’s near-impregnable line at Stirling.44 Scotland’s survival now depended on the committal of all the country’s resources to the defensive effort. Achieving this demanded the unified sense of purpose that had galvanized the country behind the Covenant in 1639. It proved impossible to recapture. This was not because Scottish politicians and churchmen were somehow more predisposed to ‘ideological schism’ than their English counterparts. The presence in Scotland of a king, and this king, had made differences irreconcilable. The young man who was hectored relentlessly by Scottish clerics about the sins of his father and mother was also a monarch who had sanctioned the invasion of Scotland even as he negotiated with its commissioners. His actions were reminiscent of nothing so much as those of his father a decade earlier. 45 In this respect, Charles’s involvement in an abortive plot known as the ‘Start’, which sought to use a force raised in the north to force a change of government, confirmed existing impressions about the king’s untrustworthiness. His actions further convinced the Western Association that Scotland was being punished, through the instrument of an English ‘sectarian’ army, for its sinfulness. In October, a group of gentlemen, ministers, and commanders of the Association issued a Remonstrance insisting that Charles should not be allowed to exercise his royal powers until there were ‘evidences given’ of ‘reall change in him’. Although John Lambert’s cavalry destroyed the Association as a military force in early December, the Remonstrance continued to provoke heated debate. It has been suggested that the Remonstrance’s ‘isolated’ and numerically ‘limited’ supporters were only heeded because the structures of the presbyterian church gave minority groupings a platform for their unrepresentative opinions.46 Further research may reveal, on the contrary, that the Remonstrance’s appeal to notions of limited, godly monarchy garnered considerable popular support in the Covenanting heartlands. This may better explain why the Remonstrance continued to prove so divisive and so difficult to contain in the years ahead. With the English army now in control of some of Scotland’s most fertile lands in the south, the pressure to stop the purges had become overwhelming. On 14 December, parliament issued a ‘resolution’ stating that, with due acknowledgement of certain reservations expressed by the kirk, those who wished to fight should be allowed to assist in the prosecution of this ‘just and necessarie defensive warr’. In defiance of the so-called ‘Resolutioners’, a group of twenty-two clerics, led by key supporters of the remonstrance, issued a ‘protest’ against the readmittance of erstwhile Engagers and malignants to places of public trust.47 Majority opinion in parliament and General Assembly favoured the

132   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 Resolutioner position, and the counter-campaign orchestrated by the Remonstrants and Protesters, although deeply principled, resulted only in time-consuming and distracting arguments. The acts of classes were finally repealed in June, but it was probably too late. Within the month, a force commanded by John Lambert had broken the stalemate by winning an important battle at Inverkeithing, on the north side of the Forth. A desperate remnant of an army now faced three unpalatable choices: starvation, surrender, or an invasion of England. A year to the day since the disaster at Dunbar, what remained of the Scottish army was completely routed in the west Midlands town of Worcester. A few days later, many of Scotland’s leading politicians and clerics were captured by English forces at Alyth in Perthshire. The Covenanted state, as a political and military entity, had ceased to exist. Robert Baillie lived to see ‘our poor countrey made ane English province’,48 although it happened more than twelve years later than he had anticipated. At the end of 1651, those Scottish men and women who had not succumbed either to epidemic disease or death by some other violent means found themselves living in a world of religious schism, political crisis, military occupation, and economic hardship. These facts make it easy to see why most historians regard ‘the covenanting movement’ as ‘a failure’.49 Yet the defeat of the Covenanted state did not result in the total destruction of Covenanted society. Although the Covenant could never again act as the bedrock of a national church, its brief ascendancy helped to entrench the religious culture that would give Scottish public life—for good or ill—much of its distinctive aspect well into the eighteenth century. Differing interpretations of the significance of the Covenant poisoned the politics of the Restoration era, with a minority prepared to resort to violence to defend their ideals, but it is undeniable that the document itself remained a potent source of spiritual inspiration. In terms of its legacy, the Covenanting era has always suffered from unfavourable comparisons with both England and Enlightenment. The fiscal, military, and administrative innovations pioneered by Covenanters failed to make Scotland the equal of other small states like Sweden and the United Provinces, but they did transform how state power was experienced by the Scottish people in the decades leading up to the 1707 Union. Seventeenth-century Scottish political thought, particularly on those questions of authority, liberty, and sovereignty brought so contentiously to the fore by the Covenanting experiment, remains to be fully explored.50 Covenanting government did not survive. Its achievements, ideals, and failings would profoundly influence Scottish society for generations to come.

Notes 1. English Historical Documents, 1603–1660: Volume V(B), ed. Barry Coward and Peter Gaunt (London and New York, 2010), 582–3. 2. David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (Basingstoke, 2004), xii. 3. Allan I.  Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005); Allan I. Macinnes, ‘The “Scottish Moment”, 1638–45’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2009), 125–52.

laura a. m. Stewart   133 4. For further reflections, see Laura A. M. Stewart, ‘Power and Faith in Early Modern Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, 92, suppl. 234 (2013). 5. David Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1644–51 (new edn., Edinburgh, 2003), p. xvi. 6. For example, Macinnes, Revolution, 187. 7. Allan I. Macinnes, ‘The Scottish Constitution, 1638–51: The Rise and Fall of Oligarchic Centralism’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context, 1638–51 (Edinburgh, 1990), 124–5. David Stevenson’s groundbreaking survey remains invaluable, Government under the Covenanters, 1637–1651 (Scottish History Society, 4th ser., vol. 18, Edinburgh, 1982), pp. x, xix, xxvii, xl, xliv. For a new approach, see Laura A. M. Stewart, ‘Fiscal Revolution and State Formation in Mid Seventeenth Century Scotland’, Historical Research, 84 (2011): 443–69. 8. Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, passim. Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. Keith M. Brown et al. (St Andrews, 2007–12), 1645/11/110, 1649/1/44 (hereafter RPS). The Acts were applied after parliament had determined that the accused was not guilty of crimes punishable by death. Permanent exclusion for first-class delinquents was enacted only in 1649. 9. David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–44:  The Triumph of the Covenanters (Newton Abbot, 1973), 300, 302; Keith M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family, and Culture from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh, 2004), 235, with caveats at 237–9. 10. General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, The Declaration of the Commission of the General Assembly, to this Whole Kirk and Kingdom of Scotland of the Fifth of May: Concerning the Present Publike Proceedings towards an Engagement in Warre, so Farre as Religion is Therein Concerned ([Edinburgh,] 1648), 8. 11. John R. Young, The Scottish Parliament, 1639–41: A Political and Constitutional Analysis (Edinburgh, 1996), 65, following Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 276–8. 12. Macinnes, ‘ “Scottish Moment” ’, 139; ‘The Scottish Constitution’, 123. 13. Young, Scottish Parliament, 44–6, 64, 108; Macinnes, ‘The Scottish Constitution’, 122–3; Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 276–7, 299–310. 14. The Western Association, which issued the Remonstrance of October 1650 (see p. 131), might be considered an exception. No noble openly supported it, although there were individuals, notably Cassillis, who may have agreed with its sentiments. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 159. 15. National Archives of Scotland [NAS], Register of the Committee for Moneys (North), 1646, PA14/4, 52, 53–4, 116–17, 122; Reports to the Committee on Losses, 1646–7; for example, PA16/4, Reports to the Committee of Losses, nos. 6–9 (earl of Erroll), no. 10 (Forbes of Culloden); RPS, ‘Comission to the marquis of Argyle’, 1644/1/125; ‘Reference in favoures of Andro, lord Fraiser and otheres’, 1644/6/85. 16. Laura A. M. Stewart, Urban Politics and the British Civil Wars: Edinburgh, 1617–53 (Leiden, 2006), 271–7. 17. Correspondence of the Scots Commissioners in London, 1644–46, ed. H.  W. Meikle (Edinburgh, 1917), 53 [quotation], 69, 83, 121. 18. Scots Commissioners, ed. Meikle, 178. 19. RPS, ‘Desires of the kingdome of Scotland’, 1646/11/155; Gilbert Burnet, Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald (London, 1677), 393, 396.

134   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 20. Robert Baillie, Letters and Journals, 1637–1662, 3 vols., ed. David Laing (Bannatyne Club, 1841–2), II, 362; III, 11–13. 21. NAS, Register of Minutes: Committee of Estates, Mar. 1647–Feb. 1648, PA11/5, n.p., 11 June 1647; 19, 20 Aug. 1647. 22. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 83, 179; Macinnes, British Revolution, 187. 23. John J. Scally, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Covenanter Parliaments, 1639–51’, in Keith M. Brown and Alastair J. Mann (eds.), The History of the Scottish Parliament, Volume 2: Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1567–1707 (Edinburgh, 2005), 155–6. 24. ‘Mr Thomas Reade’s relation’ in Miscellany of the Scottish History Society: Volume II (1st ser., Edinburgh, 1904), 296. 25. RPS, ‘Act anent the resolutiones of parliament concerning the breaches of the covenant’, 1648/3/66; Baillie, Letters and Journals, III, 24–8. 26. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex, or, The Law and the Prince . . . (London, 1644), 99; The Lord Marques of Argyle his Speech to a Grand Committee of both Houses, June 25. 1646 (London, 1646), 3–5. ‘The safety of the people’ was a term used by Rutherford, Lex, Rex, Qu. XXV. 27. Burnet was given privileged access to the Hamilton archive to write his account, Memoirs, pp. viii, xiv; 425. 28. Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (Cambridge, Mass., 1937–1947), ed. W. C. Abbott, I, 657, 663, 669. 29. NAS, Linlithgow Town Council Minutes, 1640–59, B48/9/2, 275–6, 278–9; RPS, ‘Comisioune to the committe of estates’, 1649/1/293. For contentious elections in Edinburgh, see Stewart, Urban Politics, 89–91, 279–84. 30. NAS, Register of minutes:  committee of estates, Sept. 1648–Jan. 1649, PA11/7, fos. 1v, 11v–15v; Committee of Estates, Wheras, many within this kingdom have joyned in armes for prosecuting of an unlawfull engagement against our neighbour nation of England . . . (Edinburgh, 1648); Committee of Estates, A declaration of the Committee of Estates concerning their proceedings in opposition to the late unlawfull engagement against England (Edinburgh, 1648). Sixteen nobles attended, plus two noble officers of state, RPS, Sederunt, 4 January 1649, 1649/1/2. 31. Cf. Young, Scottish Parliament, 217, 221, 336; Stevenson, Revolution, 114–15. My interpretation is closer to Macinnes, ‘Scottish Constitution’, 107. 32. Abbott, Writings and Speeches, 678. 33. The best account remains Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 113–21, 129; Scally, ‘Covenanter Parliaments’, 139 [quotation]. 34. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 108, 126; Sean Kelsey, ‘The Kings’ Book:  Eikon basilike and the English Revolution of 1649’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution, c.1590–1720:  Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester, 2007), 160–3; RPS, ‘Instructions from the parlement of Scotland to their commissioners at London’, 1649/1/21. 35. Cf. John Morrill, ‘Introduction: Cromwell Redivivus’ in Jane Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012), 10. 36. RPS, ‘Proclamation of Charles the second king of Great Britane, France and Ireland’, 1649/1/71. 37. Sir John Hurry, Sir William Hay of Dalgety, Colonel William Sibbald, and Captain John Spottiswood (grandchild of John, archbishop of St Andrews), were also executed in 1650, Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 137. Allan Macinnes has suggested that Charles II’s sacrifice of Montrose ruined prospects for an ‘inclusive patriotic accommodation between Covenanters and Royalists in Scotland’: British Revolution, 191, 193. Given the visceral hatred of Montrose

laura a. m. Stewart   135

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

amongst Covenanters, any such alliance was highly unlikely on their part. See Edward J. Cowan, Montrose: For Covenant and King (Edinburgh, pbk edn, 1995), 266–7. ‘Letter from Paris, 17/27 April 1650’, Letters and Papers Illustrating the Relations between Charles the Second and Scotland in 1650, ed. S. R. Gardiner (Edinburgh, 1894), 69. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 141–2. A Declaration of the Committee of Estates of the Parliament of Scotland, in vindication of their proceedings from the aspersions of a scandalous pamphlet, published by that excommunicate traytor James Grahame . . . (Edinburgh, 1650), 18, 21. An incomplete version exists in NAS, Register of Minutes: Committee of Estates, 5 December 1649–26 February 1650, PA11/9, fos. 38r–45v. King James Version, 2 Chronicles 18–19. Abbott, Writings and Speeches, II, 307–8, 309. Oliver Cromwell, A Letter Sent to the General Assembly of the Kirke of Scotland . . . (London, 1650), 4–5. A Declaration of the Army of England upon their March into Scotland . . . (London and Edinburgh, 1650), 7–8. Abbott, Writings and Speeches, II, 304–5. John Nicoll, A Diary of Public Transactions and Other Occurrences, Chiefly in Scotland, from January 1650 to June 1667, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh, 1836), 20, 28. Austin Woolrych, ‘Cromwell as a Soldier’, in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harlow, 1990), 112–14. There is no good scholarly account of the campaigns from a Scottish perspective. For a balanced analysis of strengths and weaknesses on both sides, see Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (Harlow, 2007), chap. 12. For Cromwell’s problems following Dunbar, see Abbott, Writings and Speeches, II, 393–8, 419–20; Cromwell to Speaker Lenthall, 21 July 1651, 432–3. Macinnes, British Revolution, 191 [quotation]. See also Scott, Politics and War, 201. Stevenson, Revolution, 146. Alexander Peterkin, Records of the Kirk of Scotland, containing the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies from the year 1638 . . . (Edinburgh, 1838), 604. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 158. RPS, ‘Answer to the remonstrance from the commissioners of the general assembly’, 14 December 1650, A1650/11/8. Baillie, Letters and Journals, I, 65. Stevenson, Revolution, 181. Laura A. M. Stewart, ‘Cromwell and the Scots’, in Mills, ed., Cromwell’s Legacy. Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003); Colin Kidd, Unions and Unionism:  Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 (London, 2003), esp. chap. 6.

Further Reading Coffey, John, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: Samuel Rutherford and the Scottish Covenanters (Cambridge, 1997). Cowan, Edward J., Montrose: For Covenant and King (Edinburgh, new edn, 1995). Gentles, Ian, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (Harlow, 2007). Macinnes, Allan I., The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005). Morrill, John (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context, 1638–51 (Edinburgh, 1990).

136   Scottish Politics, 1644–1651 Scott, David, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (Basingstoke, 2004). Stewart, Laura A. M., ‘English Funding of the Scottish Armies in England and Ireland, 1640–48’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009): 573–593. Stewart, Laura A. M., ‘Fiscal Revolution and State Formation in Mid Seventeenth Century Scotland’, Historical Research, 84 (2011): 443–469. Stewart, Laura A. M., Rethinking the Scottish Revolutions: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651 (Oxford, forthcoming, 2015). Stevenson, David (ed.), Government under the Covenanters, 1637–1651 (Scottish History Society, 4th ser., vol. 18, Edinburgh, 1982). Stevenson, David, Highland Warrior:  Alasdair MacColla and the Highland Problem in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1980). Stevenson, David, ‘ “The Letter on Sovereign Power” and the Influence of Jean Bodin on Political Thought in Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, 61 (1982): 25–43. Stevenson, David, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1644–51 (new edn., Edinburgh, 2003). Stoyle, Mark, ‘English “Nationalism”, Celtic Particularism, and the English Civil War’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000): 1113–1128. Young, John R., The Scottish Parliament, 1639–41:  A  Political and Constitutional Analysis (Edinburgh, 1996).

Chapter 8

T he Centre Ca nnot  H ol d Ireland 1643–1649 Micheál Ó Siochrú

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.1

On 15 September 1643, the king’s representative in Ireland, James Butler, earl of Ormond, signed a Cessation of arms, valid for twelve months, with representatives of the Catholic Confederate association, bringing an end to almost two years of bloody conflict. The agreement divided the country into separate spheres of influence and was intended to create political space for the two sides to reach a permanent peace settlement, thus enabling Irish Catholic resources, including manpower, to be diverted to England.2 Ten days after the Cessation in Ireland, the English parliament signed the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scottish Covenanters. Within a few months, a large Scottish army crossed south over the border and helped turn the tide of the war in England. Ormond, elevated to the rank of marquis and appointed as lord lieutenant in recognition of his service to the king, did manage to transport some royalist regiments back to England in late 1643 and early 1644 but a peace treaty with the Confederates proved elusive. In fact, over the next five years royalists and Confederates engaged in tortuous negotiations that did not reach a definitive conclusion until mid-January 1649, two weeks before the execution of Charles I. This long delay proved fatal to the king’s interests throughout the three Stuart kingdoms and left Ireland vulnerable to decisive military intervention from England by Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army.

138   The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649

Historical Overview Despite the importance of this conflict in shaping the course of Irish history, scholars of the early modern period frequently neglected the 1640s, being drawn instead to the Nine Years War (1594–1603) or the Jacobite Wars (1688–91) at either end of the seventeenth century. Compared to the voluminous literature on the English civil war, very little was written on a struggle in Ireland seemingly characterized by nothing more than sectarian bloodshed, internecine feuding, and tedious negotiations. In the late nineteenth century, the antiquarian J. T. Gilbert produced an invaluable seven-volume collection of Confederate documents, including a narrative of the period by the secretary of the Confederate Supreme Council, Richard Bellings, and selections from the Carte manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.3 In 1882, C.  P. Meehan reissued after a gap of almost forty years a revised and enlarged edition of his narrative survey of the 1640s, which acknowledged the importance of Gilbert’s contribution. Meehan’s work remained the standard account of Confederate Ireland for almost another hundred years.4 Gilbert continued to collect, transcribe, and publish material relating to mid-seventeenth-century Ireland but he died in 1898 before completing a number of projects. The subsequent destruction of many official records during the Irish civil war in 1922 discouraged further research. Thereafter, historians shied away from major institutional, political studies, focusing instead on biographies of some of the key players, mainly from the Catholic side.5 In 1932, Michael Hynes analysed the controversial mission to Ireland of the papal nuncio, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini.6 His work coincided with the publication in the original Latin of the first of five volumes of Commentarius Rinuccinianus, a contemporary account by two Irish clerics. In addition to the authors’ narrative, the work contains copies and translations of original Confederate documents.7 Over the next forty years little of importance appeared apart from two very effective chapters by Patrick Corish for volume three of the New History of Ireland, summarizing existing knowledge and providing an impressively coherent narrative of events.8 In the early 1980s, a Scottish scholar, David Stevenson, explored the military links between Ireland and Scotland in two monographs, one of which dealt with the dramatic career of Alasdair MacColla.9 Shortly afterwards, Jerrold Casway produced an authoritative biography of Owen Roe O’Neill, the iconic leader of the Ulster Irish, who secured their only major battlefield victory at Benburb in June 1646.10 Finally, Jane Ohlmeyer’s seminal life of the influential if maverick figure of Randal MacDonnell, earl of Antrim, adopted a ‘three-kingdoms’ perspective, associated in many minds with the New British History, which emerged in the 1970s.11 This model is still very much in vogue but as Peter Lake has argued, this ‘is not so much a new subject (British history) as simply a more integrated reading of English, Scottish and Irish histories’.12 In 1999, my monograph, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis, became the first major dedicated study of the Confederate association to appear

Micheál Ó Siochrú   139 in print in over a hundred years.13 Confederate Ireland sought to resurrect the association’s considerable achievements, as the only example of sustained self-government by the Catholic Irish on a national level prior to the declaration of the Republic in January 1919. The book focused in particular on the emergence of an influential group of political moderates, who promoted a vision of strong, self-reliant Irish kingdom, tolerant of diversity, where loyalty to the Stuart monarchy rather than ethnicity or religious affiliation was the primary political consideration. Confederate Ireland argued that class ultimately determined political divisions within the Confederate association and blamed the collapse of Irish Catholic interests on the obstructive tactics of the marquis of Ormond and of his supporters within the association. Since the appearance of Confederate Ireland four major studies have added greatly to our knowledge of the period, while at the same time challenging aspects of my interpretation. First out of the blocks was Pádraig Lenihan’s Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49, which evaluated the Confederate war effort on a number of different levels—logistical, technological, tactical, and strategic.14 Lenihan contended that previous accounts of the 1640s, including Confederate Ireland, sought to attribute the Confederate defeat to political factionalism alone, neglecting obvious military shortcomings in the process, principally the inability to keep forces in the field. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin’s Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 provided a nuanced analysis of papal intervention in Irish politics and religious life, placing developments in a broad European, Counter-Reformation context.15 Ó hAnnracháin disputed the existence of a moderate middle ground in Confederate politics and placed ethno-religious considerations rather than class at the very heart of the conflict. Robert Armstrong’s Protestant War: The British of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms acted in many ways as a companion volume to Confederate Ireland by focusing exclusively on the Protestant community.16 Armstrong argued that Confederate Ireland underestimated the difficulties faced by Ormond in pursuing a royalist agenda, which sought to obtain assistance from Irish Catholics without alienating the king’s Protestant subjects. The political machinations of Ormond, according to Armstrong, reflected nothing more than the impossible nature of the task he faced. The latest contribution to the debate is by Jane Ohlmeyer, who in her recently published book, entitled Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century, portrays the war in Ireland during the 1640s primarily as a baronial conflict.17 While not disagreeing with the central thesis of Confederate Ireland, Ohlmeyer places a far greater emphasis on the role of leading aristocratic figures in shaping the Confederate agenda. This essay will explore political developments between 1643 and 1649, in a country torn asunder by military intervention from England and Scotland, as well as ethno-religious violence between the Catholic Irish and Protestant newcomers, while at the same time re-evaluating the conclusions drawn in Confederate Ireland in light of observations and criticisms made by Lenihan, Ó hAnnracháin, Armstrong, and Ohlmeyer.

140   The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649

Confederate Association The Ulster rebellion, which began on 22 October 1641, triggered a war in Ireland that would last almost twelve years and result in the death of over a quarter of the Irish population. The causes of the rebellion are still disputed by historians but it is abundantly clear that the conservative Catholic landowning elite, having planned and executed the initial revolt, quickly lost control of events.18 Within days a nationwide rising targeted government strongholds and Protestant settler communities in an attempt to overturn successive plantation schemes in Ulster and elsewhere. The forces of the colonial government retaliated with brutal force, indiscriminately targeting the entire Catholic population, which further escalated the violence. Thousands probably died on both sides although the biased and imprecise nature of the surviving evidence precludes the possibility of a definitive statement on the number of casualties.19 By early 1642, the Catholic elite, horrified by the complete collapse of social order, sought to regain the initiative through the establishment of governmental structures. With the assistance of the Catholic Church, these landowners, lawyers, and merchants formed the Confederate association. The association’s primary function was to enforce law and order in its territory, to organize militarily, and then to negotiate a settlement with the king from a position of strength. The outbreak of the English civil war in August 1642 halted the flow of military supplies to colonial forces in Ireland, thus providing vital breathing space to the Confederates. Moreover, the king’s breach with the Westminster parliament allowed him to develop an independent Irish policy for the first time since the Ulster rebellion began. In Ireland, the support of the Catholic Church proved crucial in consolidating the authority of the fledgling Confederate regime. The bishops eagerly embraced the concept of aligning religious affiliation with national consciousness, and in May 1642 an Ecclesiastical Congregation declared the war, fought to defend the Catholic religion and the liberties of the kingdom, to be both ‘lawful and just’.20 Over the next six months, throughout rebel-controlled areas, priests administered an oath of association to the civilian population, which pledged its loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church, Charles I, and the kingdom of Ireland. The Confederate motto, ‘Hiberni unanimes pro Deo Rege et Patria’ (‘Irishmen united for God, king and country’), neatly encapsulated this multi-layered allegiance. In October, following a number of lengthy meetings, the Confederates created elaborate power structures, based in Kilkenny, the heartland of rebel-controlled territory. A  legislative General Assembly, similar in function to the Dublin parliament, debated the big issues of war and peace, while an executive Supreme Council assumed responsibility for the daily functions of government. Provincial and county councils extended Confederate authority throughout the localities, while provincial armies replaced those irregular levies badly mauled by government forces during the early months of the conflict. In effect, the Confederates established a parallel government to the colonial administration in Dublin, raising taxes and maintaining armies, as well other activities usually reserved to the crown, such as sending envoys to foreign courts.21

Micheál Ó Siochrú   141 Traditional accounts focus on the existence of two distinct groups within the Confederate association, based primarily on ethnic grounds. Internal Confederate tensions throughout the 1640s are usually ascribed to the antipathy between the Old English, descendants of the original settlers from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the indigenous Old Irish population.22 Like all generalizations this interpretation contains an element of truth and many on both sides felt uncomfortable with the new alliance. Nonetheless, political and social interaction over four hundred years had increasingly blurred ethnic distinctions, while more recently both groups had suffered religious discrimination as a result of their adherence to the Catholic faith. From the outset the Confederates made strenuous efforts to preserve ethnic harmony within their ranks. The first General Assembly in October 1642 ordered that no distinction or comparison be made between ‘old Irish, and old and new English, or between septs or families, or between citizens and townsmen and countrymen, joining in union, upon pain of the highest punishment’.23 As Catholics they joined together for mutual protection, but the Confederate leadership actively espoused a more inclusive form of national identity, insisting that the king treat all his Irish subjects, regardless of their ethnic background, equally before the law. Place of birth, rather than ancestral blood, now provided the essential criterion for membership of the Irish nation, potentially enabling Protestant newcomers to share a sense of community with their Catholic neighbours. As a Confederate delegation explained during subsequent peace talks with the royalists in 1644, ‘for he that is born in Ireland, though his parents and all his ancestors were aliens [foreigners], nay if his parents are Indians or Turks, if converted to Christianity, is an Irishman as fully as if his ancestors were born here for thousands of years’.24 This remarkable statement of inclusivity contrasted starkly with the bigoted utterances of many leading Irish Protestants and English parliamentarians, as well as the hysterical outpourings of the London newssheets. The Confederate leadership saw no contradiction between this emerging national identity in Ireland and loyalty to the Stuart monarchy. Indeed, from the very beginning all Confederates favoured a negotiated settlement with the royalist regime.

Government Reaction Initially, the administration in Dublin, staffed for the most part by English parliamentary sympathizers, rejected any peace overtures. Unable to sustain a military offensive against the Catholic rebels, the Lords Justice sought instead to consolidate their control of enclaves around Dublin in the east, Cork in the south, and Derry in the north, launching occasional devastating raids in support of isolated outposts. In February 1643, Captain William Tucker described in glowing terms one such foray by Sir Richard Grenville, ‘killing and destroying by fire and sword all that came in his way’.25 At this time, however, startling news reached Dublin of the king’s willingness to receive peace proposals from the Confederates, in the hope of obtaining supplies and manpower for

142   The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649 use against the English parliament. The Lords Justice argued against any peace ‘before the sword or famine’ devastated the ranks of the rebels, making them more likely as a result to accept minimal concessions.26 Despite these protestations, talks began shortly afterwards, while the commander of the colonial forces, the earl (and subsequently marquis) of Ormond, gradually seized control of Dublin for the royalist cause, removing the Lords Justice and their allies from office, and establishing tentative lines of communication with Kilkenny. In addition to these important political developments, the impact of Continental veterans helped change the nature of the war in Ireland. With the eruption of hostilities in the three Stuart kingdoms, thousands of Irish and Scottish veterans returned from the continent. After prolonged exposure to the horrors of unrestrained warfare, they appreciated the advantages of military discipline, which had become increasingly evident in the latter stages of the Thirty Years War.27 The principle of reciprocity gradually came to form the basis of the ‘rules’ of war in Ireland. From late 1642, the increased professionalism of the various armies, especially the Covenanting and Confederate forces, along with the threat of retaliation, acted as a moderating influence, as all sides acknowledged that the introduction of some general rules of engagement would be of mutual benefit.28 The conflict continued to rage across the four provinces, with frequent raids and skirmishes, as well as sieges and the occasional set-piece battle. Yet, at least until 1647, no major massacres took place, terms of surrender were honoured, and prisoners were exchanged on a regular basis. The publication of strict codes of conduct also signalled efforts to regulate the behaviour of troops during large-scale military campaigns.29 This is not to suggest that atrocities did not take place, but the reality in Ireland during much of the 1640s was far removed from the indiscriminate butchery of the early months of the conflict, as conventional armies on all sides operated largely according to accepted military standards.30 Increasing moderation on the battlefield gradually created the space for political dialogue, and following the Cessation of violence in September 1643, Ormond was able to ship thousands of troops back to assist the royalist cause in England, with mixed results.31 The papal agent to Kilkenny, Pietro Francesco Scarampi, had opposed the truce, believing that the Confederate forces could achieve outright military victory. Such optimism was probably misplaced but the Cessation did create real difficulties for the Confederates about how best to pursue their military and political goals. They remained at war with the Scottish Covenanters in Ulster, while Munster Protestants switched their allegiance to the English parliament in 1644, establishing a hostile enclave in the southern province as a result. In the face of these threats, the Confederates equivocated between an insular and an external military strategy. An insular strategy involved defeating the various enemies of the Confederates, including the royalists, and then, with the entire kingdom under their control, negotiating a deal with Charles I from a position of strength, as the Scots had recently done. Those advocating an external strategy argued that the rights of Irish Catholics could only be protected by a royalist victory in England, which would curb the power of a hostile and predatory English parliament. After restoring his authority, so the argument went, a grateful king would happily bestow concessions on his loyal

Micheál Ó Siochrú   143 Catholic subjects, who had provided crucial military aid. The Confederate leadership favoured an external strategy from 1643 to 1646, but in contrast to the intervention of the Scottish Covenanters on behalf of the English parliament, did not provide any direct military support to the king in England.32 This failure to transport troops across the Irish Sea can be primarily attributed to the protracted nature of the negotiations between the Confederates and the king’s representative in Ireland, the marquis of Ormond.

Treaty Negotiations and Factional Politics Following the Cessation of violence in September 1643, intense negotiations, mainly in Dublin, dominated the political landscape for the next five years. Two main power blocs emerged at Kilkenny, namely the ‘peace’ and ‘clerical’ factions. The peace faction consisted primarily of existing landowners, aristocrats, and gentry, all with a considerable stake in society and most to lose in the event of military defeat. They favoured a limited settlement that would guarantee religious toleration, allowing Catholics to worship in private without hindrance, while preserving their estates and granting them access to public office. They provided an element of continuity in Irish political life. A significant number, both Old Irish and Old English, had sat in the Dublin parliament of 1640–1, men such as Richard Butler, Viscount Mountgarret, chairman of the Supreme Council, Richard Bellings, secretary of the Supreme Council, and Donough MacCarthy, Viscount Muskerry, another leading member of the Supreme Council. The close relationship of many in this group with the marquis of Ormond, primarily through marriage and business interests, led Confederate rivals to refer to them contemptuously as ‘Ormondists’, a term subsequently adopted by historians. The label is misleading, as a desire to preserve estates and social status, rather than any personal loyalty to Ormond, provided their primary motivation. The clerical faction emerged as an increasingly vocal opposition in Kilkenny after 1644, particularly when peace talks with the royalists looked like reaching a conclusion. Convinced, with some justification, that the Confederate leadership would not insist on major religious or indeed political concessions, this group favoured a more radical settlement on the grounds that only the full restoration of the Roman Catholic Church, recognized by the state, could guarantee permanent religious security. The faction viewed with suspicion the more secular impulses of the Kilkenny leadership, which threatened to dilute the specifically Catholic elements of the Confederate association. The clerics received crucial support from returning exiles, most of them Old Irish in extraction, such as General Owen Roe O’Neill. Living for decades in Spanish territories, men like O’Neill never had to compromise on religious matters in the same manner as those who remained in Ireland. Many of these returnees, having lost out in successive plantation schemes, also demanded a more comprehensive land settlement, in the hope of recovering confiscated estates.

144   The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649 Ó hAnnracháin argues that ethnicity was the primary factor in deciding factional loyalty. The leadership of the ‘peace’ faction did indeed consist primarily of those of Old English descent, while the Old Irish predominated in the ‘clerical’ faction, but this traditional interpretation overlooks the centrality of landownership in determining the political outlook of any individual.33 The possession of large estates, for example, enabled Donough MacCarthy, Viscount Muskerry, a man of Old Irish extraction, to be accepted as leader of the ‘peace’ faction, while his associates included those from the ranks of the so-called deserving Irish in the Ulster plantation settlement, such as Sir Phelim O’Neill and Alexander MacDonnell. Social status not ethnic background proved paramount, though Ó hAnnracháin is correct to point out that religious convictions did motivate a number of existing, if largely impoverished, landowners to support the clergy. Ohlmeyer, however, believes that social status effectively reflected ethnic divisions in Catholic Ireland, with the peace faction dominated by an Old English aristocracy, while the clerical faction represented the dispossessed Old Irish.34 The aristocracy undoubtedly played a major role in political and military affairs during the 1640s. Nonetheless, the survival of the personal papers of many leading families, alongside the destruction of so many official records in successive fires, has distorted the picture to some extent, emphasizing the importance of the aristocracy in the Confederate association at the expense of key figures in the gentry, as well as in the legal and clerical professions.

Protestant Ireland Tensions within the Confederate association increased dramatically with the arrival of a papal nuncio, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, in late 1645. Appointed by Pope Innocent X to uphold the dignity of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Rinuccini refused to countenance any treaty with the royalists that did not contain significant religious concessions.35 The demands of the clergy and their allies created enormous difficulties for the king, anxious to exploit the financial resources and manpower of Ireland, yet acutely conscious of the deep hostility felt by his English subjects towards the Catholic Irish. His strategy of reaching out to Kilkenny alienated many royalist supporters in Ireland and created enormous difficulties for the marquis of Ormond. After the initial shock of the insurrection, Irish Protestants eagerly joined those forces mobilized by the colonial administration to crush the rebellion, and advocated a purely military solution to the crisis. This made their loyalty to the king highly conditional. Many of them deeply resented the truce with the Confederates in 1643. According to Colonel Audley Mervin, a Protestant officer serving in Ulster, a peace with the Irish is generally a harsh sound to every ear and the reason of this is diverse. Some in conscience hold no toleration of their religion, some judge the blood of their friends yet unrevenged, some their personal lives not to be repaired, others that it is beyond the reach of state to provide for our security in the future, and not a few because the country is pleasant and held too good for them.36

Micheál Ó Siochrú   145 In early 1644, representatives from the rump parliament still sitting in Dublin travelled to the royal court at Oxford to put the Protestant case. They demanded ‘the establishment of the true Protestant religion in Ireland’, the strict imposition of penal laws against Catholics, and an extension of the policy of plantation throughout the kingdom. After a short period of consultation, the king’s advisers rejected these terms as too extreme.37 Charles I urgently required a settlement with the Confederates before organized Protestant opposition completely undermined his Irish strategy. Typically, rather than take any tough decisions himself during talks at Oxford with a Confederate delegation headed by Muskerry, the king instructed Ormond to negotiate with the Kilkenny regime on his behalf. Unfortunately for Charles, the marquis, fearful that any possible deal would result in further defections by Irish Protestant royalists to the English parliament, proved unequal to the task. The extent of the problems faced by Ormond became clear when in July 1644 the royalist commander in Cork, Lord Inchiquin, declared for parliament in protest at the continuing peace talks with the Confederates.38 Similarly in Ulster, army officers loyal to the king watched helplessly as their subordinates eagerly embraced the Solemn League and Covenant, joining forces with the Scottish Covenanters.39 Armstrong is correct to highlight the pressures on Ormond from within the Irish Protestant community, which undoubtedly limited his room for manoeuvre both politically and militarily. Nonetheless, an increasingly desperate king urgently required assistance from Ireland. As Armstrong readily concedes, ‘to ingest [the Confederate association] back into the body politic was one route, but to disrupt and dismantle it through defections and defeats was another acceptable option’.40 Acceptable to Ormond perhaps, and he ruthlessly pursued this latter strategy, even to the detriment of the king. What Armstrong perhaps does not fully appreciate is that Ormond’s primary loyalty throughout the 1640s was to himself and to the Irish Protestant interest. He remained determined not to concede on key religious issues such as the redistribution of church property and revenue, a stance that threatened to derail the peace talks entirely. Charles I recognized the problem long before his military defeat in England and authorized the earl of Glamorgan to negotiate secret religious concessions with Kilkenny. Glamorgan signed a treaty with the Confederates in August 1645, but both the king and Ormond denounced the deal when the English parliament publicized the details in late 1645.41 Despite this setback, the Confederate leadership, dominated by the peace faction, finally agreed terms with Ormond in late March 1646, ignoring clerical concerns about the absence of religious guarantees. The lord lieutenant’s intransigence, therefore, did succeed in destabilizing the Confederate association by further dividing the peace and clerical factions, but failed to produce any military aid for the king in England. Unable to assemble another field army after the disastrous defeat at Naseby, Charles I surrendered to the Scottish Covenanting army at Newark in Nottinghamshire in May 1646, effectively bringing the war in England to an end. The king spent the next two years negotiating a possible settlement with parliament, while at the same time attempting to form a new royalist alliance, incorporating supporters in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

146   The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649

Confederate Civil War In Ireland, the war continued unabated, with Confederates, royalists, parliamentarians, and Covenanters engaged in a complex series of interlocking conflicts. In August 1646, the marquis of Ormond, on behalf of Charles I, finally proclaimed the peace with the Catholic Confederates agreed earlier in the year.42 Although too late to intervene in the English civil war, Ormond still hoped to strengthen the king’s hand in negotiations with parliament by threatening a royalist invasion from Ireland. The peace treaty granted many of the political and economic concessions sought by the Confederates, including guarantees for their existing estates, but did nothing for those who had lost out in the plantation process. It also carefully sidestepped the controversial issue of religion by postponing any decisions until the king regained his liberty. This compromise satisfied the conservative landowning leadership in Kilkenny, but outraged the Catholic clergy, led by Rinuccini. The nuncio condemned the treaty as contrary to the Confederate oath of association, and excommunicated all those who favoured peace with the royalists.43 With the support of General Owen Roe O’Neill, fresh from his overwhelming victory over the Scots at Benburb, which removed the Covenanters as an active force in Irish political and military affairs for the remainder of the decade, Rinuccini staged a coup d’état and seized power in Kilkenny.44 He ordered O’Neill, along with another leading returnee, General Thomas Preston, to move against Ormond in Dublin, but this potentially decisive offensive failed because of Confederate infighting and the onset of winter. Moreover, the diversion of resources to the Dublin campaign prevented the Confederates from pressing home major military gains in Ulster, Connacht, and Munster, undermining any prospect of seizing control of the entire kingdom.45 The setback before Dublin weakened the authority of the nuncio and his faction, allowing a group of moderates, led by Nicholas Plunkett, to dictate Confederate policy. A trained lawyer and major landowner from one of the most important Old English families of the Pale, Plunkett served as chairman of the General Assembly throughout the 1640s. He also sat on the Supreme Council and played a key role in the difficult negotiations with Ormond. Few, if any, Confederates matched his record of active involvement and political influence during this period. Plunkett’s enduring ability to appeal to all sides enabled him to exploit dissatisfaction with the excesses of the two principal factions, and to move the Confederate association towards the political middle ground.46 In August 1646, sent by the ruling junta in Kilkenny as an envoy to assuage clerical opposition to the Ormond treaty, he dramatically switched sides in a move that facilitated the nuncio’s seizure of power. He soon developed his own agenda, however, ably assisted by Nicholas French, bishop of Ferns. Initially, an enthusiastic member of the clerical faction, French had adopted a hard line against Protestants in his hometown of Wexford during the early years of the war.47 The failure of the Dublin offensive convinced the bishop to adopt a more pragmatic approach. Plunkett and French advocated a new deal with the royalists, albeit with significantly enhanced conditions, particularly on matters of religion, but Ormond proved intractable. The marquis felt betrayed by the Confederate rejection of

Micheál Ó Siochrú   147 the peace treaty, while the assault on Dublin convinced him of the futility of the king’s cause in Ireland, despite the growing prominence of the moderates at Kilkenny. Ó hAnnracháin disputes the existence of this moderate grouping, arguing with some justification that the somewhat fluid membership of the different factions makes it difficult to identify political allegiance with any degree of certainty.48 Plunkett, as outlined above, switched between factions on several occasions but in so doing managed to create political space for himself and likeminded individuals. These factions were not, however, political parties in the modern sense, but rather a loose grouping of individuals, held together by a desire to influence policy in a certain direction. Indeed, the moderates did not necessarily identify themselves as a separate group. Nonetheless, Plunkett and his associates successfully steered a middle course at a crucial juncture in late 1646/early 1647 before ultimately succumbing to factional pressures in the face of successive military disasters, brought about by the decision of the English parliament to re-enter the Irish war. With Ormond isolated in Dublin, and the Scottish Covenanters on the defensive following their disastrous defeat at Benburb, the English parliament sensed an opportunity to seize the military initiative in Ireland. The end of the war in England allowed it to consider diverting resources to Ireland for the first time since the summer of 1642. In February 1647, a parliamentary expedition landed in Munster, ostensibly to support the local Protestant commander, Lord Inchiquin. Tensions between Inchiquin and the expedition’s leader, Philip Sidney, Lord Lisle, undermined the mission, which achieved nothing of consequence, apart from providing some desperately needed military supplies to local Protestant forces.49 A second foray into Ireland that summer proved far more successful, when in June commissioners from Westminster convinced Ormond to surrender the city of Dublin to the English parliament. Ormond’s actions directly contravened orders from Queen Henrietta Maria at the exiled royal court in France, who favoured an accommodation with the Confederates as the basis for a renewed alliance against parliament. Ormond, failing to recognize the significance of the shift of power in Kilkenny, away from the clerical faction and towards the moderates, refused to hand Dublin over to ‘the tyranny of those that then ruled amongst the Irish’.50 He left for England shortly afterwards to deliver a report on his actions to the king, before joining the other royalist exiles on the Continent. In a conspicuous display of his own prejudices, the marquis preferred English Protestants of whatever political persuasion to Irish Catholics, a decision that subsequently proved disastrous for both royalists and Confederates.51 His actions, however, were entirely consistent with his political stance throughout the 1640s and should not have surprised anybody. Like all Irish Protestants, he was loyal to the king only to a point. Perhaps Charles I deserved no better from his subjects. The new parliamentary governor of Dublin, Colonel Michael Jones, commanded an army comprising local Protestants and troops recently arrived from England. On 8 August 1647, he annihilated the best equipped and best trained Confederate army at Dungan’s Hill near Dublin, while in Munster the rabidly anti-Catholic Lord Inchiquin, reinforced with fresh supplies of arms and men from England, launched a destructive raid deep into Confederate territory. Inchiquin’s campaign culminated in the

148   The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649 destruction of yet another Confederate army at the battle of Knocknanuss in November. The Confederate association faced total defeat but the outbreak of the second English civil war in 1648 prevented further military supplies reaching Ireland, and temporarily stalled the parliamentary offensive. Nonetheless, the military and political situation remained extremely fluid and unpredictable. In April 1648, Lord Inchiquin declared for the king and agreed a controversial truce with Kilkenny, while the return of Ormond to Ireland in September raised the possibility of a renewed formal alliance between the royalists and Confederates.52 Rinuccini and Owen Roe O’Neill, fearing an attempt to revive the discredited peace treaty, opposed these moves, plunging the Confederate association into an inconclusive civil war. Starved of supplies from England, Michael Jones in Dublin could do little to take advantage of the situation. A triumphant English parliament, however, shorn of all moderate members, and without the restraining influence of the king, was likely to commit significant resources to the ‘pacification’ of the Catholic Irish in the near future. Indeed, news of the king’s impending trial generated a greater sense of urgency in the talks between Ormond and the Confederates, and on 17 January 1649 the two sides signed a second peace treaty in Kilkenny.53 Concern for the fate of the king temporarily papered over many of the cracks. Ormond graciously promised further concessions, but Catholic Ireland remained deeply divided, while Rinuccini departed for Rome shortly afterwards.54 Moreover, within two weeks the execution of Charles I removed with the stroke of an axe the final obstacle to major English military intervention in Ireland. The time to avenge the massacre of Protestant settlers in 1641, and reassert English dominance, was close at hand. In August, Oliver Cromwell landed on the outskirts of Dublin with an army of 12,000 men and the largest train of artillery yet seen in Ireland. Over the next four years parliamentary forces crushed all resistance and re-established English colonial rule, dealing a fatal blow to the Irish Catholic landowning class in the process. The Cromwellians spent over £1,000,000 a year in subjugating Ireland, demonstrating the economic dominance of the English state over the Confederates, who throughout the 1640s had struggled to raise £70,000 annually.55 These major financial resources, combined with a well-established military machine and a deep-seated hatred of the Catholic Irish, drove the English on to a bloody and costly victory.56

Conclusion The horrors of the Cromwellian conquest in many ways continue to overshadow the events of the mid-seventeenth century in Ireland. The period was dominated by extreme violence, sectarian hatreds, and indiscriminate bloodshed and yet the 1640s also witnessed a remarkable flowering of Irish national sentiment through the Confederate association, anticipating by almost two centuries the reforming nationalist tradition of Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. Confederate Ireland focused on these positive aspects as well as the negative and the central tenets of its thesis retain

Micheál Ó Siochrú   149 their validity, albeit that our understanding of Catholic Ireland’s great experiment in self-government has been greatly enhanced by the works of Lenihan and Ó hAnnracháin, while Armstrong and Ohlmeyer, in different ways, provide an invaluable counter-balance. The experiment ended in failure and for historians there is no ignoring the harsh military realities of the situation. In the absence of significant outside intervention by the Catholic powers of Europe, the Confederate association proved incapable of withstanding the full might of the English state.57 This fact, however, as Lenihan succinctly explains, ‘is not to overstate the importance of military factors at the expense of political factionalism; the two are inextricably linked’.58 The Confederates did not control sufficient resources to compete militarily with the English Commonwealth over a prolonged period but internecine feuding further undermined the war effort and hastened the process of defeat. The English civil war delayed the reconquest by seven years but ultimately Irish Catholics, bitterly divided and chronically under-resourced, had no answer to Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army.

Notes 1. ‘The Second Coming’, in W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dublin, 1920). 2. A collection of all the papers which passed upon the late treaty touching the cessation of armes in Ireland . . . Dublin, 1643 (RIA vol. 38, box 34, tract 1). 3. See J. T. Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, 7 vols. (Dublin, 1882–91). He had already published three volumes of documents dealing mainly with the Cromwellian period, including the anonymous memoirs entitled ‘Aphorismical discovery of treasonable faction’, a savage critique of the earl/marquis of Ormond. J. T. Gilbert (ed.), A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1879–80). The 272 volumes of the Carte collection in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, manuscripts originally held by the Butler family in Kilkenny, remain the major source on seventeenth-century Irish history. 4. See the dedication in C. P. Meehan, The Confederation of Kilkenny (Dublin, 1882). The first edition appeared in 1846. 5. Irish history still awaits a major biography of Ormond, who dominated the political landscape for almost fifty years. J. C. Beckett, The Cavalier Duke: A Life of James Butler, First Duke of Ormond, 1610–1688 (Belfast, 1990) provides an uncritical overview. Perhaps the sheer scale of the surviving sources acts as a disincentive. 6. Michael Hynes, The Mission of Rinuccini, Nuncio Extraordinary to Ireland, 1645–1649 (Louvain, 1932). 7. Richard O’Ferrall and Robert O’Connell, Commentarius Rinuccinianus, de sedis apostolicae legatione ad foederatos Hiberniae catholicos per annos 1645–9, 6 vols. (Dublin, 1932–49). The sixth volume consists of an English language summary and an extensive index. The Irish Manuscript Commission is currently preparing a five-volume English translation for publication. 8. See Patrick J.  Corish, ‘The Rising of 1641 and the Catholic Confederacy, 1641–5’ and ‘Ormond, Rinuccini, and the Confederates, 1645–9’, both in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland, vol. III: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976), 289–316, 316–35. While publications remained thin on the ground, three

150   The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649 significant doctoral theses covered unchartered territory—Hugh Hazlett, ‘A History of the Military Forces Operating in Ireland, 1641–1649’, 2 vols. (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1938); Dónal Cregan, ‘The Confederation of Kilkenny: Its Organisation, Personnel and History’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University College Dublin, 1947); John Lowe, ‘The Negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny, 1642–9’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1960). 9. David Stevenson, Alasdair MacColla and the Highland Problem in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1981). The other book, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates: Scottish–Irish Relations in the Mid-Seventeenth Century (Belfast, 1981), concentrated on the impact of the Scottish Covanenting army in Ulster during the 1640s. 10. Jerrold I. Casway, Owen Roe O’Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland (Philadelphia, 1984). 11. Jane Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683 (Cambridge, 1993). 12. Peter Lake is quoted in Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999): 446–62, at 448. Irish historians for the most part have responded negatively to the New British History, levelling charges against it of Anglo-centrism and anti-Europeanism. See for example, Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), p. vii. 13. Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1999; 2nd edition 2008). In 1954, T. L. Coonan wrote a confused and deeply flawed narrative of the period, entitled The Irish Catholic Confederacy and the Puritan Revolution (Dublin, 1954), from a traditional and totally uncritical Irish nationalist perspective. 14. Pádraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49 (Cork, 2001). 15. Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002). 16. Robert Armstrong, Protestant War:  The British of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Manchester, 2005). 17. Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2012). 18. The extremes of the argument are probably best represented by on the one side Raymond Gillespie, who agrees with many contemporaries that the uprising came as a complete surprise to a society largely adapting to the new colonial system, and on the other by David Edwards, who stresses the endemic nature of violence in early modern Irish society. See Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth Century Ireland (Dublin, 2006), 143–51, and David Edwards, ‘Out of the Blue? Provincial Unrest in Ireland before 1641’, in Jane Ohlmeyer and Micheál Ó Siochrú (eds.), Ireland 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester, 2013). 19. Aidan Clarke makes this point very forcibly. See ‘The 1641 Massacres’, in Ohlmeyer and Ó Siochrú (eds.), Ireland 1641. Between 2007 and 2010 an AHRC and IRCHSS-funded project transcribed, digitized, and published online () the 1641 depositions, 8,000 witness statements by Protestant refugees fleeing rebel forces, which had been lodged in the Trinity College Dublin Library in 1741. The accessibility of this source to scholars throughout the world will help transform our understanding of this crucial period in Irish history. 20. ‘Acts of the Ecclesiastical Congregation, 10–13 May 1642’ in British Library [BL] Stowe Ms 82, fos. 271–4. 21. The workings of Confederate government are discussed in detail in Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 205–36.

Micheál Ó Siochrú   151 22. Corish reinforced this interpretation in his own analysis of the period. See Corish, ‘The Rising of 1641’, 320–2. 23. ‘Acts of General Assembly of Confederation, October 1642’, in Gilbert (ed.), History of Irish Confederation, II, 73–84. 24. ‘Confederate explanation of propositions, 1644’, in Gilbert (ed.), History of Irish Confederation, II, 298–305. 25. ‘Journal of Captain William Tucker, 1642–3’, in Gilbert (ed.), History of Irish Confederation, II, 199. 26. Lords Justices and others to the King, 16 March 1643, in Historical Manuscripts Commission [HMC], Ormond MSS, new series, II, 251–2. 27. Peter Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy:  A  History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009)  is a superb account of this formative conflict. Wilson is one of the few historians to give equal coverage to the latter stages of the war and in so doing charts this gradual moderation in conduct. 28. One critic later accused Ormond of ‘a slack and unfaithful prosecution of the war’, and reported incredulously how he refused to retaliate for an alleged breach of quarter by the Catholic Irish. [Adam Meredith,] Ormond’s curtain drawn: in a short discourse concerning Ireland (London, 1646), 13, 29. 29. This argument is discussed in detail in Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641–1653’, Past and Present, 195 (2007): 55–86. 30. The belief persists among most historians that the conflict in Ireland somehow operated outside the acceptable laws of war as understood in the seventeenth century. Robin Clifton stated that unlike England and Scotland it was only in Ireland ‘that civil war unleashed humanity’s full capacity for wholesale and pitiless slaughter’, while Nicholas Canny argues that despite the efforts of some professional soldiers, ‘it quickly became apparent that warfare in Ireland was constrained by no moral economies’. See Robin Clifton, ‘An Indiscriminate Blackness? Massacre, Counter-massacre and Ethnic Cleansing in Ireland’, in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Massacre in History (Oxford, 1999), 107; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), 568. Similarly, according to John Morrill, massacres perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell merely reflected the codes of military conflict in the Irish theatre. See John Morrill, ‘Historical Introduction and Overview: The Un-English Civil War’, in J. R. Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 1997), 6. 31. Estimates of the number of troops transported to England by Ormond have gradually declined. According to Pádraig Lenihan, 2,000 troops were transported from Munster to Bristol in November 1643. Five under-strength regiments travelled from Dublin to Chester, in addition to two further regiments and four cavalry troops, totalling perhaps 3,000 men: Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 76. See also Keith Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish Historical Studies, 18 (1972): 143–76; Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven, 2005). 32. In 1644, the Confederate leadership sanctioned a campaign in Scotland led by Alasdair MacColla with 2,000 troops. His small force, in association with the marquis of Montrose, achieved a remarkable string of victories before being defeated and dispersed in late 1645. See Stevenson, Alasdair MacColla. 33. Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland, 80–1. 34. Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English, 274–6.

152   The Centre Cannot Hold: Ireland 1643–1649 35. Instructions from Innocent X to Rinuccini, in G. Aiazza (ed.), The Embassy in Ireland of Monsignor G. B. Rinuccini, Archbishop of Fermo, in the years 1645–49, translated into English by Annie Hutton (Dublin, 1873), pp. xxvii–xlix. 36. Colonel Audley Mervin to Ormond, 4 February 1645, in HMC, Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormond, vol. I, 14th report, appendix part 7 (London, 1895), 93. 37. John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (London, 1721–), V, 953–71. 38. A letter from the Right Honourable Lord Inchiquin and other commanders in Munster to his Majestie (London, 1644). The letter book of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill (later earl of Orrery) contains a number of the declarations on behalf of ‘all his Majesty’s Protestant subjects in the province of Munster’. See BL Add. MSS 25287, fos. 4v–12. Inchiquin may also have been piqued by his failure to obtain the position of Lord President of Munster. 39. These developments are discussed in detail in Armstrong, Protestant War, 95–118. 40. Armstrong, Protestant War, 125. 41. ‘Articles of agreement between Glamorgan and the confederates, 25 August 1645’, BL, Add. MSS 25277, fo. 62. 42. The treaty articles are in Gilbert (ed.), Irish Confederation, V, 286–310. 43. The decree of excommunication was published on 1 September 1646. See Bodleian, Carte MS 18, fo. 414. 44. For the decline in the power of the Covanenters in Ulster post 1646, see Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates, 237–52. 45. In addition to the victory at Benburb, the Confederates had seized the strategically vital castle at Bunratty at the mouth of the Shannon, which the parliamentarians had hoped to use as a potential launching pad for further incursion into Munster. Preston had also made major inroads into Connacht, including the capture of Roscommon. See Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 90–5. 46. The rise of a ‘Middle Group’ group in Confederate politics, following the rejection of the first Ormond peace treaty, is discussed in detail in Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 118–42. 47. For the outbreak of the rebellion in Wexford see Jason McHugh, ‘For Our Own Defence: Catholic Insurrection in Wexford’, in Brian MacCuarta (ed.), Reshaping Ireland, 1550–1700: Colonization and its Consequences (Dublin, 2011), 214–40. 48. Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland, 171–5. 49. The war in Munster has received relatively little attention from historians. For Lisle’s expedition see Patrick Little ‘The Irish Independents and Viscount Lisle’s Lieutenancy of Ireland’, Historical Journal [HJ], 44 (2001): 941–61; John Adamson, ‘Strafford’s Ghost: The British Context of Viscount Lisle’s Lieutenancy of Ireland’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995), 128–59. 50. ‘Ormond’s report to the king at Hampton Court’, BL Egerton MS 2541, fos. 377–81. 51. On 2 August 1649, while attempting to regain Dublin from the forces of the English parliament, Ormond’s royalist/Confederate alliance suffered a catastrophic defeat at Rathmines. Less than two weeks later, Oliver Cromwell landed unopposed in Dublin and used the city as the base from which to launch his devastating conquest of Ireland. Ormond’s prestige and authority never really recovered from this disaster. 52. The articles of agreement between Inchiquin and the Confederate Supreme Council, 20 May 1648, Bodleian, Carte MS 22, fo. 99. 53. The second Ormond Peace is published in Gilbert (ed.), Irish Confederation, vol. 7, 184–211.

Micheál Ó Siochrú   153 54. The Marquesse of Ormond’s proclamation concerning the peace concluded with the Irish rebels . . . with a speech delivered by Sir Richard Blake . . . also a speech delivered by the marquesse of Ormond (London, 1649). 55. Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 222–3. 56. For a detailed account of the Cromwellian conquest, see Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2009). 57. For Confederate relations with the Catholic powers of Europe, see Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘Ireland Independent:  Confederate Foreign Policy and International Relations during the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995), 89–111. See also Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘The Duke of Lorraine and the International Struggle for Ireland, 1649–1653’, HJ, 48 (2005): 905–32. 58. Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 224.

Further Reading Armstrong, Robert, Protestant War: The British of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Manchester, 2005). Brady, Ciaran and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005). Edwards, David, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007). Lenihan, Pádraig, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49 (Cork, 2001). Murphy, Elaine, Ireland and the War at Sea, 1641–1653 (Woodbridge, 2012). Ó hAnnracháin, Tadhg, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002). O’Hara, David, English Newsbooks and the Irish Rebellion, 1641–1649 (Dublin, 2006). Ohlmeyer, Jane, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim (2nd edition, Dublin, 2001). Ohlmeyer, Jane, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2012). Ó Siochrú, Micheál, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (2nd edition, Dublin, 2008). Ó Siochrú, Micheál (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Dublin, 2001). Stoyle, Mark, Soldiers and Strangers:  An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven, 2005). Wheeler, James Scott, The Irish and British Wars, 1637–54:  Triumph, Tragedy and Failure (London, 2002).

Chapter 9

The Reg i c i de Philip Baker

The execution of Charles I by his English subjects on 30 January 1649 is arguably the single most dramatic and iconic event in English history.1 Having been publicly tried and convicted in the grandeur of Westminster Hall, the king was beheaded, once again in public, on a scaffold erected before his own neo-classical Banqueting House in Whitehall. The symbolic and bloody act of regicide provides the cornerstone of popular memories of the English revolution, and it is unsurprising that professional historians attach comparable significance to the event, albeit for a variety of reasons. For some, it represented the climax of a revolution that began earlier in the decade, perhaps as early as November 1640, with the convening of the Long Parliament, or as recently as December 1648, with the army’s purge of that institution. For others, it heralded the arrival of a distinctive and revolutionary period in English history that endured until the collapse of the republican regime and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. For others still, it marked the beginning of what proved to be an abortive revolution that failed to radically transform the political, social, and economic axioms of early modern society.2 These contrasting readings are attributable, at a general level, to divergent views of the entire 1640–60 period and of whether it encompassed any recognizable form of revolution at all. But they are also the result of heated scholarly debate over specific issues concerning the regicide and its immediate consequences. These include the motivations and objectives of those who brought the king to trial; the rationale behind the formal charge that was levied against him; and the justifications for his execution, the abolition of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic. Such issues lie at the heart of this chapter and a review of them now may be considered timely. For much of the twentieth century, the standard reading of the regicide was as the act of a small, committed body of men in the army and House of Commons, who became thoroughly convinced of the king’s guilt for the civil wars and of the need to destroy him, along with the monarchy, in order to bring peace and settlement to England. The twenty-first century has seen a fundamental challenge to this interpretation. It has been argued that the trial, verdict against, and death of Charles I were all far from foregone conclusions; that the king contributed to his own downfall by overplaying the relative

philip Baker   155 strength of his position during the trial; and that the whole episode of the regicide needs to be viewed within a multiple kingdoms context and not simply through the prism of events at Westminster. Aspects of this thesis have been accepted by many scholars and have found their way into recent general writing on the period, but dissenting voices have provided a vigorous critique of this apparent new orthodoxy, seeking to rejuvenate the more traditional view. As a result, the subject of the regicide has become something of an historiographical minefield for scholars and students alike. This chapter aims to steer a path through these recent controversies, highlighting the crucial points of disagreement and suggesting a possible means for their resolution. But it also considers how different approaches could move the debate on the regicide beyond its current parameters and open up future avenues of research.

Treasonable Words and Theories of Regicide, 1640–6 It is extremely unlikely that any of the men who took up arms in Scotland in 1639, in Ireland in 1641, or in England in 1642, did so with the intent of bringing Charles I to the executioner’s block, or ever imagined that that would be the king’s fate within a matter of years. However, when so much of the recent literature on the regicide has taken the form of a forensic investigation of the events surrounding the final weeks and days of the king’s life, it may be worthwhile standing back momentarily and adopting a longer-term perspective. This is, of course, not to argue that the immediate causes of the regicide need to be traced back to events in the late 1630s, or still earlier. Rather, it is to suggest that the combined constitutional, political, and cultural experiences of England, Ireland, and Scotland during the long decade of the 1640s created a climate of opinion in which it became possible for people within all three kingdoms to publicly debate the future of Charles I and the Stuart monarchy, and in which the end of both was no longer regarded as unthinkable. This public discourse—which involved commoners and soldiers as well as the political elite—was the result of a variety of factors, and the chapter begins by considering how a number of them contributed in some way to the final act of regicide. If those who initially assumed arms against Charles I did not directly seek his death, his demise was nonetheless spoken of by small numbers of his subjects from the very outset of the civil wars. This, in itself, was nothing new. Evidence of treasonable and seditious utterances against early modern English monarchs, including openly discussing their death, has recently been traced back to the time of Henry VI. But during a protracted civil war, for which some increasingly held Charles personally responsible, such talk gradually increased, and this demeaning and dishonouring of the king can be seen as an implicit challenge to his authority to rule and as a deconsecration of his majesty.3 Moreover, it was not simply idle countrymen, fuelled by drink, who spoke out against their king. As early as 1641, the MP Henry Marten—one of the few

156  The Regicide genuine contemporary republicans—is said to have declared, ‘I do not think one man wise enough to govern us all.’ Two years later, he allegedly opined that ‘it was better one family should be destroyed then [sic] many’.4 By 1646, meanwhile, and in the aftermath of the parliamentarian victory over Charles I, the earl of Northumberland argued that, ‘he being conquered, they might dispose of the kingdome and affaires as they pleased’.5 If such statements were not entirely without precedent historically, what was more novel about the situation in the 1640s is that they often now appeared in print. Whereas previously, treasonable language had largely been restricted to oral and scribal circulation, the outbreak of unlicensed printing in the early 1640s increased its potential to reach a much larger audience and to influence people’s thinking, and thus to create a wider public debate. Once again, both the incidence of such language and the audaciousness of the views expressed escalated over time, something that can be attributed to the increasing boldness of authors and printers and a gradual hardening of attitudes towards the king. For example, the decade began, somewhat ominously for Charles, with a notable pamphlet interest in the reign of that most tyrannical of English monarchs, the deposed and murdered Richard II. By 1643, a tract by the minister John Saltmarsh intimated that strict adherence to the religious clauses of parliament’s oath of allegiance of that year, the Vow and Covenant, could, under certain circumstances, compel the lawful killing of the king.6 Four years later, an anonymous Leveller publication, Regall tyrannie discovered, was somewhat more forthright: ‘C.[harles] R.[ex] ought to be executed.’7 These expressions, of course, represented the opinions of only a tiny minority and were equally shocking to royalists and mainstream parliamentarians alike. For their appearance, however, the political elite in all three Stuart kingdoms bore at least some responsibility. It was they, after all, who between 1638 and 1642 unceremoniously stripped Charles I of many of his most important prerogative powers and led their peoples into civil war, thereby raising fundamental questions about the nature of monarchy, the right of resistance, and the position of the king in a future settlement. And once such issues became part of a larger public debate, the political elite were simply unable to prevent other groups from airing increasingly radical opinions and may, in fact, have inadvertently encouraged them. For example, one consequence of the propaganda war in England between leading royalists and parliamentarians during the early 1640s was the open discussion in print of a number of the ideas that were later used in justification of the king’s trial and execution. These included the association of Charles’s monarchy with tyranny, the contractual nature of government, the sovereignty of the people, and the right of subjects to resist an unjust ruler. Moreover, the onus on parliamentarian writers to publicly assert and validate such theories could have unintended consequences. Thus in 1643, a pamphlet by the presbyterian lawyer William Prynne—later a vehement opponent of the trial and execution of Charles I—included translated passages from the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, a work that justified the right to resist a monarch but which also contained arguments for their censure, deposition, and the act of tyrannicide.8 Thus, and as observed wryly by David Wootton, for all that mainstream parliamentarians abhorred the wielding of the axe in 1649, a number of them had contributed to its sharpening.9

philip Baker   157 But despite the fact that both the idea of executing Charles I and theories supporting regicide circulated from relatively early in the 1640s, it was universally expected that a constitutional settlement with the king would follow the parliamentarian victory in the first civil war in England in 1646. That it did not was largely down to Charles himself, and it is that failure to reach a settlement, and its consequences, to which we now turn.

The New Model Army and ‘that man of blood’ Although defeated on the battlefield, Charles of course remained King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and, as such, essentially refused to accept that his position had in any way been weakened. Moreover, he fully expected his opponents to fall out among themselves, given ample time and opportunity, and thus purposely stalled negotiations at every possible turn. Hence in 1646, it proved impossible for the English parliament and the Covenanter Scots to reach a settlement with a king who believed that the increasing desperation of his enemies for a deal would guarantee that the next set of terms offered to him would always be more generous than the last. And this strategy reaped obvious rewards in July 1647, when the New Model Army, which had recently entered the political sphere as a result of its conflict with the presbyterian faction in parliament, presented Charles with its own, relatively moderate terms for settlement, the Heads of the Proposals. The New Model has long been regarded as the driving force behind the regicide, and its ill-fated negotiations with the king in 1647 are seen as one of a number of factors that irrevocably turned its men against him after the first civil war. During the army’s famous debates at Putney that autumn, by when a settlement based on the Heads seemed increasingly unlikely, trooper Edward Sexby spoke out against monarchy itself and two officers referred to Charles as ‘a man of blood’—one who shed innocent blood and with whom God would have no peace. Oliver Cromwell, too, acknowledged that the king remained a threat but urged caution, arguing that God had yet to make it plain that either Charles or monarchy were to be destroyed, or that the army would be the instrument of divine judgement. By contrast, and at a time when some regiments were displaying royalist sympathies, trooper William Allen openly expressed his desire to see the king restored to his throne, if upon the right terms.10 These conflicting attitudes, which, as we shall see, were clearly in evidence up until the time of the regicide itself, demonstrate that the entirety of the army was never committed indubitably to the destruction of Charles I. Indeed, Cromwell’s words at Putney emphasize that regicide was only one of a number of possible outcomes, with deposition or an enforced abdication obvious alternatives, and from none of these did the abolition of the monarchy inevitably follow; the future of Charles Stuart and the future of the Stuart regime were not intrinsically linked. Given the events of the following year, most obviously the king’s culpability for

158  The Regicide a second civil war in England, it seems safe to assume that many more of the army supported the notion of regicide by 1649. But, as noted below, evidence of both the division and indecision revealed at Putney was still apparent during the course of the king’s trial. On the final day of the debates, 11 November, Charles escaped the army’s custody, in which he had remained since June, in a further effort to obtain more generous terms. Within a matter of weeks, he had rejected another set of propositions from the English parliament and, through the Engagement, secured military support in Scotland for an invasion of England on his behalf. Leading members of the army and their allies at Westminster were suitably enraged at this attempt (as Cromwell later put it) to vassalize them to a foreign nation that in January 1648 they pushed through parliament a Vote of No Addresses, which brought negotiation with the king to an abrupt end. Charles’s revival of the ‘British problem’ in this manner had significant repercussions. A  year later, the act setting up the court for the king’s trial explicitly referred to the need to prevent further invasions of England, and the intermittent presence of foreign troops in its northern counties over most of the previous decade has been seen as an explanation for the relatively high proportion of regicides from that region.11 By April 1648, with war clouds once again gathering over England, a prayer-meeting of army officers took place at which, it is alleged, Charles Stuart was once again branded ‘a man of blood’, and those present agreed to bring him to account for his crimes against God and the nation. Two points are worthy of note here. First, that far too much is often made of this incident as evidence of a definitive commitment by the army to undertake the trial and execution of the king. There are only two extant accounts of the meeting and both were published some years later, the main one in 1659, which raises obvious questions about their accuracy and reliability. Moreover, while the stated pledge to bring the king ‘to an account’ may (or may not) be read as a reference to a trial, neither pamphlet makes any form of reference to regicide.12 The second point refers to the notion of ‘blood guilt’, which, as Patricia Crawford has emphasized, could have a number of meanings. The idea of blood for blood, that only Charles’s death could cleanse a defiled land, might certainly be derived from a strict reading of Scripture (Genesis 9:6; Numbers 35:33). But the concept could also imply moral guilt that did not necessarily warrant punishment, as in those instances when presbyterian and Scot ministers—hardly would-be regicides—applied it to the king in the 1640s. Arguments about blood guilt could be used to justify or reinforce the need for action that fell well short of Charles’s execution. This is not to ignore evidence that the idea, or at least the rhetoric, of blood for blood was in some minds in January 1649; for example, John Bradshaw, president of the High Court of Justice, referred to both of the biblical passages cited above before declaring the king guilty. But it seems significant that it was not until a declaration of August 1650 that the army itself sought to explain the regicide on the basis of the expiation of blood guilt alone.13 The renewal of bloodshed in England and Wales during the second civil war, the invasion of a foreign army from Scotland, and the prospect (if never realized) of a second one from Ireland, only further hardened attitudes towards the king and his allies among sections of the army and its supporters in parliament. Some historians also detect an

philip Baker   159 increasing brutality to the conflict, indicative of the vengeful mood of the New Model and thus of the likely fate of Charles Stuart. In August, for example, at the end of the protracted and bitter siege of Colchester, the army’s commander, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, denied mercy to two of the surrendering royalists—Sir George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas—who were summarily shot to death. But this action was not without justification under the existing laws of war, and Fairfax’s later decision to exempt himself from the proceedings of the king’s trial indicates that he regarded sanctioning the execution of knights of the realm as altogether different to that of the nation’s anointed sovereign. Much to the utter disgust of the army, over the spring the majority of the English parliament revealed the full extent of their desperation for a personal treaty by voting to reopen negotiations with Charles—an obvious prerequisite for any settlement that would involve all three Stuart kingdoms—at the very time that the New Model was still fighting the forces that had risen in his name. By August, after the army’s defeat of the Engagers at Preston, the Vote of No Addresses was formally repealed, and the king, with no other options, prepared himself for another round of peace talks. With no royalist forces to speak of in England and the military and political demise of the Engagers in Scotland, his hopes now rested on a peace in Ireland allowing him to launch a third civil war in England. By contrast, it was precisely on the basis of their desire to bring a permanent end to military conflict in England that the presbyterian majority in parliament sought a personal treaty with Charles. Meanwhile, the realization of either of these scenarios represented an obvious threat to the army. On the one hand, an invasion from Ireland would once more force them to make the supreme sacrifice and defend the nation from a foreign army. On the other hand, a presbyterian-backed personal treaty was likely to betray all for which they had fought by restoring the king to the throne with much of his previous power intact and, consequently, leaving its men vulnerable to future reprisals. In this sense, the New Model’s actions in the aftermath of the second civil war were driven as much by self-preservation and the need to secure an alternative form of settlement as by any overt hostility towards the person of Charles Stuart.

The Army Remonstrance The army was not alone in opposing any form of personal treaty with the king. News of Charles’s impending negotiations with the English parliament saw a notable shift of opinion in the majority of provincial petitions, with those against a deal now outweighing those for. Doubtless, members of the army and its allies were heavily involved in mobilizing anti-treaty literature, but there was genuine wider support for the view that further discussion with the king was now futile.14 In London, for example, the Levellers’ ‘Large Petition’ of 11 September criticized parliament for continuing to negotiate with Charles, and demanded an end to the negative voices of both the king and the Lords, if not their outright destruction. But pointedly, it also called for the equality of all—including kings—before the law and for ‘Justice upon the Capitall Authors and

160  The Regicide Promoters of the former or late Wars’, though exactly what was meant by this was not spelt out. Alleged to have attracted 40,000 signatories, the petition marked something of a high mark of Leveller agitation and was explicitly endorsed by a number of New Model officers and regiments over the following two months. Indeed, its impact on the main direction of army thinking over that period may have been considerable, and one historian has referred to the petition as ‘the first salvo in the political battle whose culmination was the trial and execution of the king’.15 Against this backdrop, discussions between Charles and parliament opened at Newport in September. The king’s policy, as ever, was to string along his opponents until a more attractive option materialized—on this occasion, in the form of an army from Ireland. Nevertheless, the outward appearance was that the two sides were moving towards a settlement, thereby heightening tensions in the army, where the key figure during this period was not Fairfax or Cromwell but the latter’s son-in-law, Commissary-General Henry Ireton. At the Putney debates, Ireton had strongly opposed any talk of destroying monarchy or stripping the king of all power, but had acknowledged a willingness to submit to such designs if ever he believed them to be God’s will. A year on, Providence had evidently caused him to revise his beliefs, as revealed by the arguments of the army Remonstrance of November, of which he is considered the major author. What the Remonstrance does, or does not, say about the army’s intentions towards the king is one of the key issues that has prompted recent, heated scholarly debate over the regicide, and the document as a whole is worthy of some discussion.16 On one level, its arguments are clear enough. The Remonstrance states that the army’s intervention in politics is grounded upon the maxim salus populi suprema lex (the welfare of the people is the supreme law) and questions how a personal treaty with the king can be compatible with the public good. As a result, the ‘evil’ negotiations at Newport should cease immediately. Charles is accused of having broken his covenant with the people by his pursuit of private over public interest, with constitutional reform being the only means of guaranteeing against this situation in the future. On the basis that political authority originates in the people themselves, parliament must be reformed to become a true representative of the nation, one that meets regularly and to which the executive must be fully accountable. Finally, a form of elective monarchy would be retained, with a figurehead king lacking any power of legislative veto. But what of Charles himself?17 The traditional view of the Remonstrance as a clarion call for his execution has been challenged by Sean Kelsey, who maintains that its calls for ‘justice’ against the king do not equate to demands for regicide and betray a more ambivalent attitude towards him. The document may have charged him with treason, tyranny, and murder, and asserted that, as a result, he should stand trial. But the verdict in any trial was not presented as a fait accompli, and a capital sentence was not openly demanded. Although this interpretation has been strongly refuted by Clive Holmes, it is grounded on an accurate, if literal, reading of the Remonstrance. One will struggle to find an explicit call for the execution of Charles I in either the Remonstrance itself, a document of some 25,000 words, or its shorter contemporary abridgements. Arguments

philip Baker   161 certainly abound for ‘justice’ or for the ‘execution of justice’ against the king, and these may have been coded allusions to his death. But, at the same time, they are hardly clearcut demands for regicide. Similarly, calls for ‘capital punishment upon the principal author . . . of our late wars’ or for justice ‘without regard to persons’, left the identity of the potential victims open to interpretation. It is tempting, of course, to see all this as a rather feeble act of subterfuge and to deduce that readers must have known what the army was really saying. But if contemporaries were well aware that the Remonstrance presented an obvious threat to the king and to the Newport treaty, it was not universally interpreted as a blatant demand for Charles’s head. The document was a bald statement of the army’s intent to kill the Newport negotiations rather than Charles Stuart. The Remonstrance, then, falls short as a definitive blueprint for regicide, and a degree of ambiguity, leaving open at least the possibility of an alternate path to a settlement, can be detected. In fact, few, if indeed any, of the calls for ‘justice’ during the autumn and winter of 1648/9 went so far as to call irrefutably for the king’s death.18 Given we have seen that some contemporaries did so willingly from relatively early in the 1640s, this is curious, to say the least, and is a subject worthy of further research. The obvious starting point would be a detailed textual analysis and study of the authorship and composition of the Remonstrance itself. We know, for example, that when someone—presumably, though not certainly, Ireton—presented an early draft of what was to become the Remonstrance to a council of officers on 10 November, it was put aside. Five days later, and seemingly with many more officers in attendance, the council is reported to have approved it unanimously. Whether or not its content was altered during this interval, in what ways, and by whom, remain as unanswered questions. Moreover, according to the Leveller leader John Lilburne, this approved draft underwent subsequent revision when he and a number of allies successfully lobbied to have passages that were critical of the Levellers removed.19 Indeed, in its published form, the Remonstrance openly commended the Levellers’ ‘Large Petition’ on more than one occasion, and the nature of the relationship between the two documents might also be usefully explored. Finally, the convoluted history of the Remonstrance presumably had a considerable impact on its content and construction, and a close textual analysis may prove revealing with regard to the issues of its authorship and the presentation of its arguments concerning the king.20 The final version of the Remonstrance was presented to the House of Commons on 20 November, taking some four hours to read, but was never formally discussed or answered over the following days. As an obvious threat to both the king and the members of the Commons themselves, in proposing a settlement grounded in the dismantling of the existing constitution and its replacement by a form of ‘Agreement of the People’, it probably made most MPs only more eager to secure a personal treaty with Charles, the principal cause of the army’s anger in the first place. On 5 December, the Commons voted to continue negotiations with the king based on his most recent answer to their propositions. The army, which had already once more taken custody of the king and moved its headquarters to Whitehall in an attempt to pressurize the Commons into discussing the Remonstrance, acted swiftly in response. On 6 and 7 December, troops led by Colonel Thomas Pride turned away or arrested those MPs with a history of hostility

162  The Regicide towards the New Model or who had supported the Newport treaty, while others simply kept away from Westminster through fear. In reducing parliament to a mere ‘rump’ of the army’s supporters, Pride’s purge killed off any further prospects of a personal treaty between its members and the king. Whether it also spelt the death knell for Charles himself is the question to which we now turn.

Final Negotiations? Since the late nineteenth century, historians of the regicide have placed varying degrees of emphasis on the period in the weeks following Pride’s purge as one in which the army and its parliamentary allies attempted to negotiate with the king. For some, it was the failure of these attempts that ultimately sealed Charles’s fate. A  long historiographical tradition, for example, sets great store by the purported ‘Denbigh mission’ of late December, the ‘final’ effort to strike a deal with the king. This refers to the rumoured attempt by the earl of Denbigh, with Cromwell’s backing, to present Charles with settlement terms, a design that faltered when the earl was not even admitted to the royal presence. As a result, Cromwell is often regarded as having turned against the king irrevocably.21 However, there is speculation concerning a later attempt at an accommodation, via an approach made by the earl of Richmond in mid-January, and even after that rumours continued to circulate of a design to depose the king and replace him with his youngest son, the duke of Gloucester.22 Much of the evidence of these plans is entirely typical of a great deal of the surviving material that details the events surrounding the final weeks of the king’s life. It is of doubtful or at least questionable provenance, opaque, based on rumour and wishful thinking, self-interested. Mark Kishlansky’s recent deconstruction of the Denbigh mission has demonstrated vividly how scholars erected an elaborate narrative of an attempted settlement on the flimsiest of evidence.23 That lesson is an important one. The reinstatement of the Vote of No Addresses on 13 December, the strict conditions of the king’s confinement, all this would have made negotiation extremely difficult. But we cannot say with certainty that it made it impossible. The obvious need for absolute secrecy means that the historical record is unlikely to contain more than the faintest trace of any such discussions, most likely in the form of rumours or allegations. And this is precisely the nature of the evidence that describes the final attempts to negotiate with Charles but also numerous other incidents over the winter of 1648/9, and there is an extremely thin line between the acceptance and rejection of this type of material as reliable among scholars of the regicide. That final overtures to Charles were made after Pride’s purge in order to avoid his trial cannot be proven unequivocally, but they were rumoured to have taken place and remain at least as a possibility. Why they would have occurred at all is a question that also needs to be addressed. Recent literature has identified the imminent threat of an invasion from Ireland and of a third civil war in England as an obvious motivating factor.24 In Ireland, the royalist lord lieutenant, the marquis of Ormond, had been working for some months

philip Baker   163 to secure an alliance between royalist forces and the Confederate Catholic government that would result in an invasion of England in the name of the king. Moreover, by midDecember it was known that the Confederates had signed a commercial treaty with the Dutch, raising the threat of a naval alliance between royalist, Irish, and Dutch forces. Thus a treaty with Charles, in which he ordered Ormond to desist with his invasion plans, would immediately remove a pressing external threat to the army and its political allies. A number of historians have dismissed the seriousness of this threat, emphasizing that royalist commentators deliberately exaggerated the strength of the forces in Ireland and that, for all his bluster, Ormond turned out to be a paper tiger. But not until the summer of 1649 did the weakness of Ormond’s coalition became fully apparent, and the weight of the evidence suggests that its potential threat was taken exceedingly seriously over the winter of 1648/9. This seems emphatic from the formal charge against the king at his trial, which accused Charles explicitly of continuing his commission to Ormond and the rebels in Ireland with the aim of invasion. It was during the trial that news reached London of the conclusion of Ormond’s treaty with the Confederates, and this final evidence of the king’s commitment to another war is seen as having convinced at least some of his judges of the need for his death, on the grounds that personal loyalty to Charles I was the strongest force holding Ormond’s coalition together. Thus the problem of reaching a stable form of settlement within a multiple kingdoms context was an obvious reason for keeping channels of communication open with Charles. Another was that his opponents were seemingly undecided on exactly what to do with him. From 18 December, Cromwell held a series of meetings with two of the Commons’ leading lawyers, in which he invited them to draw up proposals for a constitutional settlement by parliament, rather than the sword. Nothing came of this and on 23 December the New Model published an indictment of Charles and called for his trial. However, three days later, during a Commons debate on whether the king would stand trial for his life, Cromwell declared his inability to yet offer his advice on that point.25 Intriguing evidence of wider indecision within the army comes in the form of the willingness of the council of officers, on two occasions in late December and early January, to consult a prophetess, Elizabeth Poole, with regard to how the Lord wished them to proceed. On the second of these, she informed the officers that she had received a command from God that they might try and depose but should not kill the king. Questioned as to whether her arguments were based on revelation, she confirmed it to be so.26 For men ever intent on seeking the will of the Lord, this cannot but have made a powerful impression at a time when preparations for the trial of the king were already underway.

The Trial of the King Traditionally, the verdict and outcome of the trial of Charles I, which was staged between 20 and 27 January 1649, has been regarded as a foregone conclusion. Even those historians who maintained that further overtures to the king were made after Pride’s

164  The Regicide purge have assumed that his judges were fully intent on his destruction by the opening of the proceedings. This scholarly consensus has recently been challenged by Sean Kelsey, who has presented the trial as a process of ‘extended negotiation’ with the king in which his judges sought a final settlement, one that would have preserved both Charles himself and the substance of the ancient constitution. On this basis, Kelsey asserts that the destruction of the king was not the purpose of the trial at all and that his judges were ‘reluctant regicides’, forced to condemn him only when he refused to acknowledge the authority of the court and thus to negotiate at all.27 This thesis has been criticized robustly by Clive Holmes, who supports the more traditional reading of the trial,28 and this section reviews a number of the crucial points of disagreement between these interpretations while also highlighting some of the most significant aspects of the trial. It seems clear, for example, that the trial was not only about the fate of Charles Stuart; it was also an attempt to establish the origins of legitimate political power. When in early January, the House of Lords rejected an ordinance establishing a high court of justice for the king’s trial, the Commons responded with a declaration of popular sovereignty and of its own supremacy. On this basis, an act establishing the court was subsequently passed by the Commons alone on 6 January, and the repeated efforts (some seven in all) to get Charles to plead during the trial and thus to acknowledge the authority of the court, can be read as an attempt to get him to at least tacitly acknowledge the supremacy of the Commons. Elements of the staging of the trial—its location in Westminster Hall, home of the central courts of English justice; the replacement of the royal coat of arms that originally hung over the proceedings by a shield bearing the cross of St George; the decision to allow the trial to be publicly reported, presumably on the basis that the king was expected to plead—seem deliberately engineered to emphasize that it was undertaken in the name of the people of England. All this seemingly had little impact on Charles himself, however, who was consistent throughout the trial in refusing to recognize the jurisdiction and legitimacy of the court.29 Had the king pleaded not guilty, it can be assumed that his reintegration into the constitutional structure as a figurehead monarch, stripped of all power, would only have followed his formal acquittal. The ease with which this could have been achieved, based on the nature of the charge levelled against him, is heavily disputed. On the one hand, the charge is regarded as having been deliberately enfeebled in order to give Charles ample opportunity to clear his name; on the other, it is seen as leading incontrovertibly to a finding of the king’s guilt. The argument that the charge—which accused Charles of attempting to tyrannize England by overriding the law and destroying parliament—was inherently weak can certainly be disputed, but neither, somewhat curiously, did it contain an explicit allegation of treason. Moreover, if the sole purpose of any charge was to guarantee the king’s guilt, why did the trial commissioners, after much protracted discussion, reject the notion of a far more extensive charge, listing the purported ills of his entire reign, that some of them had clearly wanted?30 Much more remains to be said on these points. The indecision over the king’s charge can be related to the palpable uneasiness of many of those involved of the proceedings in general. There were clearly no precedents in English law for the formal trial of a monarch, and the legal basis of the proceedings

philip Baker   165 remains somewhat unclear, with the use of a charge, rather than an indictment, and of commissioners serving as both judge and jury being reminiscent of a trial by martial law.31 The act establishing the high court of justice named 156 civilians and soldiers as commissioners: forty-seven of these never attended the court at all, only 101 attended sessions of the trial, and only fifty-nine signed the king’s death warrant. The most conspicuous absentee was Fairfax, who, after attending the court’s initial meeting on 8 January, never did so again and thereafter did all he could to distance himself from its proceedings. His behaviour may well be of significance for interpretations of the army’s conduct hitherto. Was it only at that first meeting that the commander-in-chief of the New Model Army himself, the man in whose name its numerous political manifestos had been issued, became aware that some were actually committed to going through with the trial of the king and even the act of regicide, as a last resort?32 Unquestionably, the spectacle of the trial of the King of England provoked major anxieties among many of his judges. Even C. V. Wedgwood’s classic account of the proceedings, in which the road to regicide is ineluctable, acknowledges the sheer extent of their apprehension, particularly in the face of the commanding performance given by Charles himself.33 Whether that performance, which revolved around the king’s refusal to plead, led to the deliberate extension of the trial in the hope he would eventually submit to the court, is another point of controversy. There may be something in the view that the apparent delays in the proceedings can be attributed simply to the need to secure as broad a consensus as possible behind their outcome. But if that outcome was predestined to be regicide, it is difficult to see how any such consensus was going to be formed. It seems far more likely that the long period between Pride’s purge and the trial; the repeated opportunities given to Charles to plead; the two full days given over to the consideration of evidence against him; and the delays between his condemnation in the court (25 January), sentencing at trial (27), and execution (30), all suggest a more deliberate policy to threaten him, eventually on pain of death, to at least plead before his judges.34 Nevertheless, it is hard to accept the view that Charles overplayed his hand during the trial and threw away his life and the Stuart monarchy with it (at least temporarily).35 Quite regardless of the intentions of his judges, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the king had formally acknowledged the authority of the court and entered a plea. His actions over the past decade, the very actions for which he then stood trial, were, in many respects, a continual demonstration of his absolute commitment to the notion of the sanctity and divinely ordained nature of monarchy and thus to the belief that he could never allow himself to relinquish his political power. Indeed, by reaffirming during the trial that he had a commitment to God to uphold the ancient laws of the land, he was able to argue effectively that, in refusing to plead before an illegitimate court, it was he, and not his judges, who stood for the rights and liberties of the people of England. Charles does not genuinely appear to have feared death on the basis of upholding these principles, and the Eikon Basilike, the work of martyrology available from the day of his execution, would ensure his immediate resurrection (and rescue of his historical reputation) as King Charles the Martyr.

166  The Regicide

Conclusion: The Impact of the Regicide The act of regicide can be interpreted as marking the ultimate failure of the attempt to find a settlement in all three Stuart kingdoms following the parliamentarian victory in the first civil war. Indeed, its most obvious repercussion was to ensure that military conflict continued to scar those kingdoms for more than another two years. A  tiny minority in England had overseen the execution of Charles I with the merest fig leaf of parliamentary respectability and against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the English nation. With the exception of a handful of committed republicans, there had been little genuine desire for the king’s death and thus the institutional revolution that followed was driven by pragmatism rather than idealism. In February 1649, the House of Lords and the monarchy were abolished on the grounds that they were a danger to the public interest, and a council of state was established to function as the country’s new executive. Not until May was England declared a ‘free commonwealth’. But in certain respects, there remained a great deal of continuity between this new regime and the old. For example, those still attending the House of Lords at its abolition found their way immediately into the new government, and the powers of the crown were essentially assumed by the council of state. The most obvious difference was the absence of an actual monarch.36 In a similar fashion, the judiciary was substantially remodelled in 1649 as a result of the prominent opposition to the regicide of many leading judges. But the main structures of the legal system remained unaltered. Cosmetic, but necessary, changes were the alteration of the name of the court of King’s Bench to Upper Bench and the omission of the customary references to the king in judges’ oaths. Finally, there was also continuity in the religious sphere, with the new regime continuing to support the at least nominal presbyterian national church structure alongside a de facto toleration of most other Protestant religious groups. In this sense, for all the immediate shock value of the act of regicide itself, its structural impact on the English state was surprisingly minimal. On one level, this is because the trial of the king, while it had a clear constitutional objective in establishing the location of political power, addressed the issue of what to do with the person of Charles Stuart, not what to do with the state. The latter question was only really confronted as an ex post facto response to regicide, and future research needs to be sensitized as to how it is possible to approach what are clearly two connected issues nonetheless separately. But it may be possible to go still further and to offer a more fundamental challenge to both, on the one hand, the older idea of an interdependent relationship between monarchy and state and, on the other, the more recent notion of the centrality of the proceedings against the king to the development of a depersonalized understanding of the state.37 This would entail arguing that the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy merely ratified formally a situation that already existed. The sheer range of powers assumed by the Long Parliament’s executive committees, which played a key role in the

philip Baker   167 parliamentarian government of England during the 1640s, certainly raise the issue of the extent to which the process of civil war state-formation had created a non-regal state before the regicide and whether the prerogatives of the crown were already in commission elsewhere long before the foundation of the council of state.38 Thus in this, and in a number of other respects, too, while this chapter has sought to provide an overview of the current thinking on the subject, it hopefully has also demonstrated that much more still remains to be said about the place of the regicide in the overall history of the English revolution.

Notes 1. My thanks to the editor, Sean Kelsey, Mark Kishlansky, John Morrill, David Scott, and Elliot Vernon for discussion of the subject of this chapter. 2. Brian Manning, 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution (London, 1992), 13–24. 3. David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010). 4. Both quotations in Philip Baker, ‘Rhetoric, Reality, and the Varieties of Civil War Radicalism’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflicts and Contexts (Basingstoke, 2009), 212. 5. Quoted in David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke, 2003), 127. 6. Baker, ‘Civil War Radicalism’, 212. 7. Regall tyrannie discovered (London, 1647), sig. A2v. 8. The first complete English translation of the Vindiciae did not appear until 1648. 9. David Wootton, ‘From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642/3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, English Historical Review, 105 (1990): 654–69. 10. John Morrill and Philip Baker, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide, and the Sons of Zeruiah’, in Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001), 19–22; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647–48 (Oxford, 1987), 263, 264. 11. David Scott, ‘Motives for King-killing’, in Peacey (ed.), Regicides, 138–60. 12. The none-such Charles his character (1651), 173–5; William Allen, A faithful memorial (1659), 3–5. 13. Patricia Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart, that Man of Blood’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (1977): 41–61. 14. Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire:  A  New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 553, 554. 15. Don M.  Wolfe (ed.), Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New  York, 1967), 279–90; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1645–53 (Oxford, 1992), 267–8, 269. 16. [Henry Ireton?,] A remonstrance of his Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax (London, 1648). 17. This discussion is based on my own reading of the Remonstrance and the arguments and evidence presented in Sean Kelsey, ‘The Death of Charles I’, Historical Journal [HJ], 45 (2002): 729–31; Sean Kelsey, ‘Politics and Procedure in the Trial of Charles I’, Law and History Review, 22 (2004): 4–5, 15; Clive Holmes, ‘The Trial and Execution of Charles I’, HJ, 53 (2010): 304–9.

168  The Regicide 18. 19. 20. 21.

Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’, 729. Gentles, New Model Army, 272–4. A number of these points will no doubt be explored in forthcoming work by Sean Kelsey. S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–49, 4 vols. (London, 1893), IV, 287; David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971), 171; Morrill and Baker, ‘Oliver Cromwell’, 31. 22. Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’, 740–2; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 170, 183, 292. 23. Mark Kishlansky, ‘Mission Impossible: Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and the Regicide’, English Historical Review [EHR], 125 (2010): 844–74. 24. See especially John Adamson, ‘The Frighted Junto: Perceptions of Ireland, and the Last Attempts at Settlement with Charles I’, in Peacey (ed.), Regicides, 36–70. 25. C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London, 1966), 78–80. 26. C. H. Firth (ed.), The Clarke Papers, 5 vols. (London and Cambridge, 1891–2005), II, 150–4, 163–70. 27. See especially Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’; Kelsey, ‘Politics and Procedure’; Sean Kelsey, ‘The Trial of Charles I’, EHR, 118 (2003): 583–616. 28. Holmes, ‘Trial and Execution’. 29. Sean Kelsey, ‘The Ordinance for the Trial of Charles I’, Historical Research, 76 (2003): 310– 31; Sean Kelsey, ‘Staging the Trial of Charles I’, in Peacey (ed.), Regicides, 71–93; Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’, 733–4, 743–4; Kelsey, ‘Trial of Charles I’, 588–9, 594–8. 30. Kesley, ‘Trial of Charles I’, 598–601; Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’, 734–5; Holmes, ‘Trial and Execution’, 298–303. 31. The comparison with martial law proceedings has been made in work by John Collins of the University of Virginia. 32. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, 98, 105–7. 33. Wedgwood, Trial of Charles I, 134–6, 146–7. 34. Holmes, ‘Trial and Execution’, 314, 315; Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’, 734, 745–9. 35. Kelsey, ‘Death of Charles I’, 744–5. 36. Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–53 (Manchester, 1997). 37. On the latter point, see especially, Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Introduction’, in Robert von Friedeburg (ed.), Murder and Monarchy: Regicide in European History, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 33–6. 38. These points will doubtless be explored in the forthcoming volumes of the History of Parliament covering the period 1640–60.

Further Reading Burgess, Glenn, ‘Regicide: The Execution of Charles I and English Political Thought’, in Robert von Friedeburg (ed.), Murder and Monarchy: Regicide in European History, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 212–236. Crawford, Patricia, ‘Charles Stuart, that Man of Blood’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (1977): 41–61. Gardiner, S. R., History of the Great Civil War, 1642–49, 4 vols. (London, 1893), IV. Gentles, Ian, The New Model Army in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1645–53 (Oxford, 1992). Holmes, Clive, ‘The Trial and Execution of Charles I’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010): 289–316. Kelsey, Sean, ‘The Death of Charles I’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002): 727–754.

philip Baker   169 Kelsey, Sean, ‘The Trial of Charles I’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003): 583–616. Kishlansky, Mark, ‘Mission Impossible: Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, and the Regicide’, English Historical Review, 125 (2010): 844–874. Lagomarsino, David and Charles T. Wood (eds.), The Trial of Charles I: A Documentary History (Hanover, 1989). Nenner, Howard, ‘The Trial of Charles I and the Failed Search for a Bounded Monarchy’, in Gordon J. Schochet, P. E. Tatspaugh, and Carol Brobeck (eds.), Restoration, Ideology, and Revolution (Washington, DC, 1990), 1–21. Peacey, Jason (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001). Underdown, David, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971). Walzer, Michael, ‘Regicide and Revolution’, Social Research, 40 (1973): 617–642. Wedgwood, C. V., The Trial of Charles I (London, 1964). Wootton, David, ‘From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642/3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, English Historical Review, 105 (1990): 654–669.

Chapter 10

Se cu rit y and Re form i n Engl and’s Oth e r Nat i ons , 164 9–165 8 Derek Hirst

From its inception, the English Commonwealth had to pay heed to its closest neighbours. It had more than enough problems to wrestle with at home in the anxious and economically ruinous conditions of 1649, but the auguries abroad were even more threatening. French, Spanish, and Dutch rulers, though they had their own domestic difficulties, sought to make trouble among the republic’s enemies, and there were plenty of these. Assorted royalist forces—Irish Catholics, Church of Ireland and Church of England Protestants, Scots presbyterians—still held most of Ireland, and were unlikely to rest content with what they had; in Scotland, the Covenanters now in power hurried to proclaim the young Charles Stuart as king not of Scotland but of Great Britain and Ireland, thus promising to replicate the recent aggressions of the Engager regime of 1648. The infant republic recognized that blood and treasure must flow outwards, but on what grounds? Since Scotland was an ancient and independent kingdom—few now could credit the old legend of the English crown’s feudal superiority—only national security could justify counter-measures there, but parliament’s insistence throughout the 1640s on the defensiveness of its war-aims must call any pre-emptive strike into question: indeed, in 1650 Lord General Fairfax’s conscience drove him to resign on just this score. And what of Ireland? Action here ought to be straightforward enough. English identity was involved: the great seal of the Commonwealth featured Ireland on its outline map of England and so declared England and Ireland inseparable. Justice reinforced the case for action: the thousands—or was it hundreds of thousands?—of victims of the 1641 Rebellion must be avenged, and investments redeemed for the thousand and more English Adventurers (including one Oliver Cromwell, Esquire) who even before war broke out in England in 1642 had subscribed loans to vindicate the Protestant cause in Ireland. Were there other pressures as well? It may have been ‘cruel necessity’ that brought Charles I to the block on 30 January 1649, but many—surely

derek Hirst   171 most—of those who helped place him there looked for further reformation. Could this be the moment not merely to make England’s world safe, but to spread true godliness and freedom? If so, Scotland too might be swept up. Indeed, when the English army did cross the border into Scotland in the summer of 1650, it issued a declaration at Musselburgh taking Jesus to be its ‘king by profession’.

Conquest and Settlement in Ireland Security in the present took priority over advancing the millennium. The history of the republic, a pariah regime to most of Europe, could be written around the problem of security, and never more urgently than in 1649 when massive unpopularity at home offered so many opportunities to the Rump parliament’s enemies abroad. Hostile neighbours could only be confronted piecemeal and sequentially since the regime’s resources were stretched thin, and the Rump was lucky that presbyterian Scots and Catholic Irish had no interest in making common cause. The initial target readily declared itself: from his exile the young Charles II saw few attractive possibilities in Scotland, for there the radical Covenanters whose position Cromwell’s army had secured in late 1648 were entrenching themselves in presbyterian intransigence; however distasteful the configurations in Ireland might seem, the dominant figure there, at least in name, was the marquis of Ormond, the reassuringly Anglican and august lord lieutenant. The first royalist challenge would come from the west, where England anyway claimed good title to act. The regime made its calculations accordingly. The disentangling of threats can seem something of an academic exercise, since crises overlapped. Cromwell is often praised for delaying his departure for Ireland until August—uncomfortably late in the campaigning season—in order to equip his expeditionary force with transport and supplies. But he had other reasons for delay, not least since it was only in May that at Burford in Oxfordshire Fairfax crushed army discontent. In turn, domestic mutiny rippled outwards, for it had been in face of unrewarded deployment to Ireland that the New Model soldiery had radicalized in the spring of 1647; two years later, the generals surely worried when Leveller calls for sympathy for Ireland’s hard-pressed Roman Catholics circulated among soldiers who had their own bleak prospects as well as their own hopes of religious toleration.1 Cross-currents appeared too in John Milton’s decision to put off writing Eikonoklastes, his answer to the alarmingly popular Eikon Basilike of Charles I, until he had finished Observations on the Articles of Peace, his diatribe against Ulster presbyterians who had allied with Ormond. But the Ulster alliance possessed its own dangers in an Ireland that was almost wholly lost to England by early 1649; probably even more important, domestic enemies (the English presbyterians) might be blackened if they could be linked to co-religionists in Ireland. Milton was not alone in trying to drive a wedge into the opposition, for as England’s Irish campaign made uneven progress in 1649–50, hard-pressed commanders like

172   Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658 George Monck in Ulster did what they could to exploit the deep divisions among the foe. Others were tempted to lump rather than to split, and not surprisingly given the deluge of Irish atrocity stories that had swept England following the 1641 Rebellion. As he urged the Council of State to decisive action against its enemies in the spring of 1649, Cromwell declared the ‘Irish interest’—which he left undifferentiated—‘the most dangerous . . . for all the world knows their barbarism’. As if to implement that judgement, when in early September the English royalist commander of Drogheda refused his summons to surrender, Cromwell consigned the garrison to the sword, stretching blood-guilt for the massacres of 1641 over all of them as he did so—though Drogheda in 1641 had held out against the rebels, and many of its 1649 garrison were English. But once the fury of the assault had left him, Cromwell did discriminate. The severed heads he sent from Drogheda to Dublin for display on the gates were those of English officers, condemned now for joining with the Irish when God had already and emphatically pronounced that England’s destiny lay not with the royalist cause. If we can measure intensity of feeling by the indignities inflicted, we may judge that Cromwell deemed some of the English more blameworthy than even the Catholic Irish.2 More broadly, Cromwell—though often not his men, and least of all at the storming of Wexford in October—tried to spare civilians in Ireland. But he did execute out of hand priests taken in places of storm, and when he confronted an assembly of Catholic bishops at Clonmacnoise in December 1649, he berated them for their ‘covenant . . . with Death and Hell’—all the while insisting that he made none suffer for belief.3 Some of his followers were more single-minded: the baptist and regicide Colonel Daniel Axtell, court-martialled for executing captives after they had surrendered on promise of quarter, justified himself with the claim that he was God’s agent against the Irish.4 Cromwell’s own responsibility direct or indirect for Drogheda and Wexford, and the behaviour of men such as Axtell under his command, turn our attention to surely the most indelible legacy of the English revolution, the conquest and settlement of Ireland. Most scholars estimate the demographic cost of the wars in Ireland in the decade from 1642 at the appalling level of around or even above one-third of the pre-war Irish population—a far higher casualty rate than in England or Scotland, and on a par with that of Germany in the Thirty Years War. Irish nationalists have sometimes pinned the blame on Cromwell, but such claims seem implausible. Other commanders committed their own massacres. Ulster Scots had cause to remember with anger Owen Roe O’Neill after so many of their number drowned at Benburb in 1646; Lord Inchiquin, a Gaelic Protestant, was with reason known locally as ‘Murrough of the Burnings’; and the bloodbath at Scarrifholis in Ulster in June 1650—just after Cromwell himself had returned to England—was the work of the New English Protestant Charles Coote, a name (father and son) freighted with a history of atrocities. Furthermore, the once-fertile hinterlands of Dublin and Cork had repeatedly been devastated, while typhus was endemic. And despite the shock value of Drogheda and Wexford, Cromwell knew the laws of war; indeed, those awful examples ensured that most strong points surrendered to him fairly quickly, and he carefully upheld the terms of agreements, even when in the disaster at Clonmel in May 1650 he had been tricked. Cromwell’s receptiveness as Protector in the

derek Hirst   173 mid-1650s to petitions from individual Irish Catholics for protection underscores the complexity of his record.5 Nevertheless, there is no mistaking the epochal significance if not of Cromwell himself then of what we might with all its horrors call the Cromwellian moment. The English polymath and surveyor William Petty estimated that around 50,000 fighting men left Ireland permanently in the aftermath of defeat, whether to serve as mercenaries in Europe or for servitude in Barbados and other plantations, while Scarrifholis destroyed the last remaining Gaelic Irish officer corps. Most of all, the settlement of Ireland, ushered in by statute in 1652, transformed the landholding structure, reducing the percentage of land in Catholic hands from 61% in 1641 to 8% in the mid1650s, before it climbed back to about 20% at the Restoration.6 That sweeping settlement was at first justified by the concern for security. Even before the act passed, Cromwell’s short-lived successor in the Irish command, his son-in-law Henry Ireton, had ordered the entire Catholic populations of Limerick and Waterford expelled as security risks from those strategic ports. The settlement commissioners went further as they set about ‘transplanting’ the remaining Catholic landed elite to Connacht, the westernmost, and therefore safest, province, and then decreed a cordon of Protestant settlement around its perimeter. And they extended Ireton’s urban strictures by expelling Catholics from all walled towns (though not the suburbs). But there were other considerations, most obviously a vengeful justice. Anybody involved in the 1641 Rebellion before the Catholic forces were regularized in 1642 was to be executed; Protestants who had opposed the English parliamentarians were to lose one-third of their lands, Catholic landowners two-thirds and face transplantation to Connacht for the remainder; even those Catholics who had stayed neutral would lose one-third to transplantation. The executions were in fact relatively few—hundreds at most rather than the 80,000 or so who might have been liable—as were the transplantations to Connacht in that inadequately administered and labour-short time; most Catholic former landowners remained as tenants in their old neighbourhoods, but overwhelmingly they were dispossessed. Their lands proved more desirable than their lives, and the Rump—hard-pressed by its creditors among the thousands of unpaid soldiers and the unrepaid Adventurers from 1642 just as its parliamentary predecessors had been in 1647—saw to the taking. Indeed, it was the creditors’ needs, rather than justice or fear, that from the outset explained the scale of the confiscations. Although the exercise is often called the ‘Cromwellian settlement’, Cromwell himself once away from the walls of Drogheda found the principle of collective guilt less persuasive, and he genuinely (and not just politically) had no wish to make martyrs; it was probably because of their suspicion of his sympathies that the Rumpers passed the Act of Settlement for Ireland in 1652 when he was not in the House.7 Later, as Lord Protector, he continued to facilitate the Protestant settlement of Ireland, most obviously at the end of 1654 by allowing Petty’s commission to draw up the great ‘down survey’ of the Irish land that was to be settled; nevertheless, he exasperated some of his servants in Ireland by his readiness to listen to individual Catholic appeals. And his son Henry, with the Protector’s manifest consent, wound up the practice of transplantation, and the execution of priests, after he took command in Ireland in 1655.8 Presumably with the Protector’s consent too, Henry

174   Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658 Cromwell in 1656 began to restore the municipal charters that had been confiscated by an army suspicious in the early days of conquest of all sectors of Irish life. It was not just Cromwellian clemency that made the settlement of Ireland less sweeping, and perhaps therefore less secure, than its makers had hoped. English Protestants willing to settle Irish land were fewer than had been expected. Not all the Catholic defeated left Ireland, and the continuing resistance of ‘tory’ marauders in a ruined landscape deterred many Englishmen who could find some prospects elsewhere as the economy in England began to improve and the Americas beckoned too. Meanwhile, delays, confusions, conflicting claims in the apportionment process, and the dawning realization that there was not enough land to go around gave the soldiers incentive to sell out at a massive discount to their officers those debentures—promissory certificates—they had received for grants of land in lieu of arrears of pay. The Adventurers, who had been waiting long for their reckoning, were subject to similar pressures. Only about 12,000 of the 35,000 soldiers entitled to land actually settled, and by 1660 probably only about 7,500 of these remained; of just over 1,500 original Adventurers around 1,000 remained to draw lots in 1653–4, and about 500 of these were still in place at the Restoration.9 The big winners were those well-placed locally to gain information, to gain access to the corridors of power, and to buy out other claimants: in other words, the New English, the Protestant settlers of an earlier generation who soon—to distinguish them from the New Protestant settlers of this generation—became known as the Old Protestants. Many were the existing estates that grew larger. The failure to establish a Protestant yeomanry in Ireland was both a symptom and a cause of the wider failure of reform. Cromwell joined John Cook—the government’s solicitor at the trial of Charles I and its choice as chief justice of Munster—in imagining conquered Ireland as a ‘white paper’ capable of taking whatever impression reformers chose to write on it. Both of them had hopes of cheap and speedy justice in the localities, and of freeing the poor from subservience to their superiors—of freeing the poor too, educated and evangelized at last, from domination by their clergy. To the Catholic bishops at Clonmacnoise, Cromwell had insisted that his army came ‘to hold forth and maintain the luster and glory of English liberty in a nation where we have an undoubted right to do it—wherein the people of Ireland (if they listen not to such seducers as you are) may equally participate in all benefits, to use liberty and fortune equally with Englishmen, if they keep out of arms’. Others would have taken such efforts further than law reform. For the cosmopolitan circle of reformers around the German exile Samuel Hartlib in England, this could be a transformative moment of improvement: the greatest achievement of the group was surely the publication in 1652 of Ireland’s Naturall History, by the émigré Dutch brothers, Gerard and Arnold Boate. But the energy that might have gone into the mining and manufactures that they advocated was soon focused on land-measurement and confiscation. And while Cook certainly laboured to provide equitable and summary justice in Munster, anxious local lawyers and landowners hemmed him in when they prevailed on the Protector’s son Henry in 1655 to revive Dublin’s traditional courts and procedures. Cook found the judgeship in the central courts that Henry Cromwell offered him easy to refuse, and his resignation left the

derek Hirst   175 cause of law reform and social reform with little to show after the high hopes born of conquest.10 The New English recovery not only guaranteed the slow process of the lawyers; it also lessened the chances that the landscape of Irish Protestantism would be significantly reshaped. The officers and soldiers of the New Model, many of them baptists or independents, included numbers of lay preachers, and to the dismay of surviving Protestant churchmen—and the curiosity of not a few Roman Catholic bystanders—these exercised their talents in the garrison towns and even beyond. When General Charles Fleetwood, Ireton’s successor as commander and as Cromwell’s son-in-law too, took over the government in 1652, he was happy to encourage them, for he saw himself as the patron of radical good causes. He and still more Henry Cromwell encouraged others as well: at the latter’s arrival in Ireland there were 110 preachers who received government salaries, and by 1658 the number had risen to 250 as the state attempted to make good on its promises to spread the Word and free the churches of the stigma of tithe support. A few of these salaried preachers were existing presbyterian ministers in Ulster who were persuaded to come into the establishment as the government made its peace with the presbyterian majority in Scotland after 1655, but the majority were independents enticed over from England. Nevertheless, if the Word was being spread, it was being spread thinly: by the end of the 1660s, the number of Church of Ireland clergy was probably double the 1658 total of salaried preachers. On the other hand, the salaries granted in the 1650s were considerably higher than most clergy in Ireland could aspire to after the Restoration.11 There were other disappointments beyond the paucity of bodies in pulpits. As separatist congregations gathered, controversies broke out locally and in print, particularly over the nature of baptism and over access to the pulpit, just as they did in England. Even had the theology of the sects, often fiercely Calvinist and exclusive, disposed them to evangelize among the Irish, internal disputes left them ill-placed to exploit an ecclesiastical field largely cleared for them by the banishment or even execution of so many Catholic priests.12 When the spread of peace allowed under-employed soldiers to vent their energies in politicking as well as preaching, the noise of dispute proved counter-productive. Baptists and other sectaries who refashioned themselves as republican critics of an increasingly conservative Protectorate attracted the suspicion of Henry Cromwell when he arrived in 1655 to supplement and then replace Fleetwood and to check army discontent. Although he looked for allies first among some of the more mainstream independents around Dublin, he grew wearied by waves of appeals and counter-appeals to Whitehall; he soon turned for mutual support to the Old Protestants in matters ecclesiastical as well as political, and the increasing visibility in Ireland of the yet more radical Quakers gave him some political cover in this. He then came out conclusively in favour of the conservative option, tithe maintenance for the clergy and the patronage rights of landowners. Conservatism did not mean inaction: the younger Cromwell took plans for a second university at Dublin to a fairly advanced stage, and to this end he acquired the massive library of James Ussher, the Anglo-Irish and Protestant archbishop of Armagh, who died in 1656 (though after reform was defeated in 1659 the

176   Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658 collection eventually found its way to Trinity College Dublin). Nevertheless, the young chief governor did little to foster outreach to the Gaelic Irish beyond sending orphans to be Anglicized in the Caribbean plantations. The differences between Fleetwood and Henry Cromwell went to the heart of the failure of the republic to live up to its reformist aspirations, and they did so because they expressed the hesitancy of the Lord Protector himself. Oliver Protector it was who sent out his son Henry to check on Fleetwood and the army radicals, and who appointed him commander in Ireland in 1655; but it was Oliver as well who left Fleetwood with the title of lord deputy until 1657 and the respect and influence that went with it, even when he had been recalled to England; and it was Oliver who continued to listen to Fleetwood on Irish matters up to the end, even after Henry Cromwell had succeeded to the deputyship. The division of authority left appointments, particularly to judgeships, unmade, it left the Irish council often inquorate, and it left radical critics unchecked. Since Henry in Ireland, even as lord deputy, needed the council’s approval for much of his business, Oliver’s inability to decide between his own increasingly conservative instincts and his continuing respect for army colleagues hamstrung the Irish government in many key areas—personnel, ecclesiastical, even fiscal. Some modest peacetime economic recovery did occur in the 1650s, particularly after Henry Cromwell started to restore town charters and lifted the wartime English restrictions on crucial Irish exports such as cattle, hides, and butter; and in its later years the regime increasingly earned goodwill from the Old Protestants. How far these should be credited among the Protectorate’s positive achievements may be questioned.

Conquest and Union with Scotland Despite massive differences in political and military context—Scotland, a unitary state in a way that Ireland was not, retained the luxury of building national armies that went down to disaster in style—the English record in Scotland curiously mirrors aspects of English performance in Ireland. Shortly after his army crossed the Scottish border, Cromwell wrote to the presbyterian clergy of Edinburgh sounding some of the same anticlerical notes as those heard by the Catholic bishops at Clonmacnoise less than a year earlier. The rhetoric now was conditional: the Scots—surely godly Protestants—may be mistaken, they may be asserting claims similar to the pope’s, but the rhetoric was strong nevertheless.13 And any concession was spiritual, not political. Cromwell and his soldiers and indeed most newsbook-reading Englishmen were as certain of the tyranny of Scottish ecclesiastical and political forms, and the unacceptability of the Scottish desire to coerce England, as they were of the blasphemies of the Irish Catholic hierarchy. They were as certain too of the incivility of both peoples.14 The style of campaigning in Scotland was very different from that in Ireland, with the result determined by major battles (Dunbar, Hamilton, Worcester) rather than a series of minor sieges; but the final outcome—thousands of English troops in each of the two

derek Hirst   177 countries throughout the Protectorate, scattered in garrisons large and small—showed a common and continuing reliance on force and a recognition of the absence anywhere of local support. The objectives at the beginning were diverse. The English authorities thought they knew more or less what they wanted to do with Ireland. Its dependency on England and English law had long been declared (Poynings’ Law in 1495, the Act for a Kingly Title in 1541, the Treaty of London in 1641). Accordingly, lords lieutenant and lords deputy—traditional titles both—exercised power there intermittently in the 1650s. All that was needed was to bring the country back to due obedience and to impose (at last) the Protestantism and civility to which generations of English would-be conquerors had aspired. Scotland was another matter. The journalists’ derision for Scots’ barbarities and indecencies made clear their conviction that the work of cultivation was needed as much there as in Ireland, but the godly in the army and the capital knew that Scotland was a Protestant country in which the strenuous work of repression and/or evangelization that must be Ireland’s lot was not needed. Cromwell and his allies hoped at first to find Scots who would persuade their countrymen to be content with their own borders, perhaps guaranteed by England’s occupation of a southern zone. Any prospect of such a partial outcome was soon lost, not so much with the ‘crowning mercy’ that God conferred on Cromwell (and England) at Worcester on 3 September 1651 as with George Monck’s capture a week earlier of the Scottish government at Alyth near Dundee. The scale of the victories had some of the Rump’s excited supporters urging that England should make of this ‘a conquest’ and (presumably) absorb Scotland forcibly as England had long ago tried to absorb Ireland. But Cromwell for one wanted to treat the former ally with respect. Under his prompting, the Rump quickly opted to ‘incorporate’ Scotland into the Commonwealth, somewhat on the model of the ‘incorporation’ of Wales into Henry VIII’s England; after at least a show of consultation with commissioners the Rump had sent north as an interim government, the Scottish shires and royal burghs ‘voted’ in April 1652 on a Tender of Union. Although the riven parliaments of the Protectorate did not manage to enact until 1657 the union with Scotland that the Tender had promised, the Protector and his council did unilaterally pass an ordinance of union in the spring of 1654. There were implications here for England’s other new conquest: perhaps something more could be achieved as a frame of rule for the island nations as a whole than the deputized government to which Ireland had been consigned since the Tudor conquest. What that would be was never fully and formally articulated—and certainly Ireland was not offered any consultation—but in practice the two conquered nations received parallel treatment.15 A handful of members with connections (usually official) to Ireland and Scotland sat in the Barebones assembly in 1653, and each country was allocated thirty parliamentary seats under the Instrument of Government at the end of the year. Despite the diverse beginnings of the English republic’s rule in Scotland and in Ireland, and despite the very different political and religious cultures of those nations, their histories at England’s hands in the 1650s reveal a surprising symmetry, and even something of an imperial framework. It was not that the republic or its apologists marked out the two neighbours as England’s empire, or even part of it: the official title, ‘The Commonwealth

178   Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658 of England, Scotland, and Ireland’, was scarcely categorical, and Cromwell himself habitually and vaguely referred to ‘the nations’ or ‘these nations’. But in both countries, more or less military rule gave place in 1655 to more courtly forms: in Ireland Henry Cromwell, a temperamental civilian albeit in title a major general, replaced Fleetwood, while in Edinburgh Lord Broghill, Old Protestant and congenital courtier, arrived from Ireland to become president of the Scottish council. The symmetry was not complete, for local aspirations in the two neighbours were so very different and differently entrenched. Nor was it neat, for local interests in both countries had to contend with the strenuous efforts of the army interest at Whitehall to contain the civilian drift. But it was there.16 There were parallels too in the republic’s reform plans and the obstacles they encountered. The Rump’s diagnosis of Scotland’s ills rested on similar assumptions to those that shaped its attempt to reform Ireland. The goals in both cases were the spread of a Protestantism—preferably Independency—that did not repress other Protestants, and of a sturdy Protestant yeomanry, freed from an overweening clergy and freed too from the influence of local landowners. No more in Scotland than in Ireland was that goal attainable with the resources to hand. The handful of independent divines that the Rump sent north with inflated salaries to spread non-presbyterian ways among a laity presumed to be yearning for freedom had some initial success with the curious in garrison towns and among some of the gentry ready enough to be rid of the kirk’s iron hand, but their energies were soon distracted by baptist preachers, most of them members of the army. The baptists certainly mounted a more dramatic challenge to a presbyterian clericalism weakened by defeat and division, and they at first benefited largely from their access to military sanction and protection—Colonel Robert Lilburne, commanding in Scotland in the early 1650s, was himself a baptist. But by late 1654 they were undercut—as in Ireland—by the Protector’s sense that religious sectarianism kept dangerously close company with political dissent. The recall of Lilburne from Scotland amid intensified royalist guerrilla activity allowed his successor in command, Monck, to put restraints on baptists and their preachings. The corollary was the survival at the local level of presbyteries and even kirk sessions. The appearance of small numbers of Quakers by the mid-1650s—as in Ireland, largely although not entirely following in the soldiers’ wake—did open small fissures in the kirk’s dominion, but there is no question that the Rump’s commissioners for Scotland, just as Cromwell himself, would have thought these scant return on the hopes of 1652. On the other hand, the blows inflicted at Dunbar and Worcester had shattered the kirk’s long-held hopes of a presbyterian international: the dream of exporting John Knox’s truths to London, which had shaped so much British history since the 1550s, was no more. In his more prosaic moments, Cromwell—who had in 1649 indicated his reluctance to intervene in Scotland—might have thought that enough of a success.17 Experience in the 1650s of the divisions and resentments within presbyterianism probably confirmed Cromwell in such an unadventurous assessment. The Scots’ Engagement of December 1647 with Charles I continued to reverberate within the kirk. For years afterwards, Resolutioners, who had finally been willing to imagine Charles and then in 1650–1 his son the young Charles II as a Covenanted king, confronted the

derek Hirst   179 minority Protesters, Covenanting fundamentalists, who had insisted on the ungodliness of Charles I and insisted still that Charles II must show genuine repentance. The feuding was bitter—it was surely partly responsible for the massive Scottish witch-hunt of 1649–50—and in 1652 the kirk’s General Assembly ceased to meet under the strain. More alarmingly, the politics of the split appeared as, in the aftermath of the disaster at Worcester, Resolutioners steadfastly prayed for their king and his family. But a few Protesters, eager to outflank and purge their enemies, were ready to collaborate with the English regime. Patrick Gillespie, who became rector of Glasgow University, convinced the Protector of his loyalty sufficiently to earn from him what became known as ‘Gillespie’s charter’, allowing the Protester leaders the prospect of control over appointments in the kirk quite independent of the Presbyterian institutions that they did not dominate. The outcry from the Resolutioners, whose greater moderation on the question of the binding nature of the Covenant was damagingly offset by their public prayers for Charles Stuart, took up far too much of the time of Lord Broghill after his arrival in Edinburgh, and even of the Protector himself. The atmosphere was so poisonous that Broghill’s eventual success in persuading the majority Resolutioners to abandon their public devotions to the absent king—allowing them to regain influence within the kirk and thus to restore some political stability—is justly taken as one of the republic’s significant achievements in Scotland.18 But it was a purely defensive one. The English design for Scotland was only marginally more successful in the field of law. The Rump’s commissioners recognized that the invasion of England in 1648 had been more the work of the nobility than of the churchmen; though they left intact the feudal tenures that shaped so much of Scots law, they moved speedily (though how successfully is not clear) to eliminate the feudal jurisdictions that underwrote a society of subordination. The Rump’s replacement for the local feudal courts was the English device of assize circuits, on the assumption that judges from the central courts would make impartial justice available to all out in the counties. To this end, in the autumn of 1652 the English majority among the seven commissioners for the administration of justice whom the Rump had appointed began riding circuit. Meanwhile, the sheriffs’ authority in the counties was divided between Scots and English officials, in the hope of securing impartiality and performance. Although one Scottish observer wrote pityingly of the entry of ‘kinless loons’ into a feuding society—several English officials were murdered—approving comments were soon heard about the less partial and speedier justice handed down by the new judges, outsiders all. Most of the applause came from English observers, but there is no doubt that Scots in the localities did appreciate the resumption of justice after so many years of war and revolution. The success of Monck and Broghill and the soldiers after 1655 in securing the justices of the peace—officers whom James VI had tried to promote long ago—helped spread justice further into the grass roots. But compromise was unavoidable: in parts of the Highlands, Monck allowed clan chiefs to enforce justice against cattle thieves, and in some of the Lowlands by the end of the decade English officials were turning to presbyterian kirk sessions to provide a measure of petty justice just as kirk sessions had in earlier generations.19 This was at best pragmatic reform and not the remodelling that the journalists had forecast in 1650–1.

180   Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658 The smallness of the return on reformist hopes owed more to pressure of business— not surprising, when debt and adultery formed the largest classes of legal business— than to the opposition of the Scottish nobility.20 At first, it had seemed that the opposite would be the case. The Act of Classes that in January 1649 followed the destruction of the Engagers at the battle of Preston brought political proscription for Engager notables. Noblemen whose finances were already wrecked—by the wars and fines of the 1640s, by Scottish law’s refusal to let them compound for debts incurred while raising troops— and who now faced at the Rump’s hands heavy fines for their Engaging along with the elimination of their feudal superiorities soon concluded they had little to lose. The English authorities faced less of a threat than they might have done since the greatest Scottish noble, the marquis of Argyll, concluded that a royalist triumph would threaten him more than the English did; nevertheless, in 1653 and 1654 endemic resistance in the Highlands flared into Glencairn’s Revolt, named after its not very effective figurehead. And though Lilburne correctly identified the political steps—reduction of the pressure on the nobility—needed to limit the violence, he lacked the stomach for an anti-guerrilla campaign. This his replacement, George Monck, emphatically possessed. Monck’s devastation of the central Highlands in 1654–5 proved as effective as his implementation of Lilburne’s recommendation that the fines on the Engager notables be reduced or remitted. Thereafter, most of the nobles concentrated on rebuilding their ruined estates and shattered finances. English rule in Scotland may not have had the same major consequence, social, political, ecclesiastical, as the land settlement had in Ireland, but there were a few material gains. The presence of garrisons in distant places such as Inverness did something to stimulate local economies and even to suppress petty brigandage. And while the slow and partial incorporation of Scotland within the framework of the 1651 Navigation Act and England’s trading world did not outlast the republic, it did introduce the merchants of Glasgow to the rewards of a tobacco trade that they continued to exploit illicitly and to considerable profit under the restored monarchy. Less positive was the experience of the thousands of Scots soldiers who were captured at Dunbar and sent—by a hardpressed English regime lacking prison facilities and caught in an economic and political crisis—to labour in the Caribbean plantations.21 Those who survived the appalling journey learned a bleaker reality of the nascent empire that so many Scots were to administer in the following centuries.

An Imperial Republic and its Costs The English too were learning about empire, and the conquests of 1649–54 proved a crucial moment. The respect of European powers for a regime that had almost simultaneously crushed resistance in Ireland and Scotland and built a navy was temporary—under the supine Charles II in the 1670s, respect was to give way to mild contempt. Nevertheless, the English suddenly came to think of themselves as

derek Hirst   181 considerable, worthy of consideration, in a way they had not done before the wars. The change can be tracked in the panegyrics of the 1650s: for example, in the work of Edmund Waller, Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden, and in the way the high notes sounded there continued to swell in the Restoration. More systematically, James Harrington predicated the republican empire he imagined in Oceana (1656) on English energies combined with Irish material and Scottish human resources. But not for the last time, acquiring an empire proved a little easier than knowing quite what to do with it. Cromwell’s strategic uncertainty is legendary. Was the new state to be driven by Protestant imperatives or by realpolitik? Was Spain or France the enemy? That uncertainty was matched in concerns closer to home yet just far enough away to unnerve. The generals and colonels at Whitehall found the freedom of movement of the Protector’s representatives, Henry Cromwell and Lord Broghill, in Dublin and Edinburgh increasingly disconcerting: particularly their civilian leanings, their appreciation of the trappings of rule, and their lapses from the sternest policies in religion. The classic instance of the generals’ machinations is the way Fleetwood in 1655 encouraged the Baptist officer and settler, Colonel Richard Lawrence, to answer in print (The Interest of England in the Irish Transplantation Stated) the printed protest of Vincent Gookin, an Old Protestant and soon Henry Cromwell’s friend, against the transplantation to Connacht of such a valuable resource as the native Irish (The Great Case of Transplantation in Ireland Discussed).22 Such suspicions and countervailing urgings—the cause of religion and security against the cause of economy and rationality—reduced Whitehall to paralysis at times, and brought officials in those secondary capitals to despair as instructions and answers failed to come through. The generals and their contemporaries faced problems constitutional as well as political in their attempts to make sense of Scotland and Ireland. Matters seemed clear enough at the beginning: Ireland was manifestly a dependency and, as the design of the great seal asserted, in important respects part of England; Scotland was offered union by the 1652 Tender of Union and protagonists doubtless hoped that it would be folded in to English parliamentary ways as Wales had been integrated generations earlier. Such was the unpopularity of both Scots and Irish in England that to bring their representatives into the Westminster system would have been provocative at any time; extending England’s political boundaries during the protectorate, when so much else was in flux, was doomed. The Protectorate’s kingship crisis in 1657 gave republican opponents of the regime a provocative reminder of the voting implications of Scottish and Irish representation in parliament. The Humble Petition and Advice, with its confirmation of the ‘single person’, was passed by fewer than the sixty votes that Scotland and Ireland combined carried; and since Broghill had come down from Edinburgh to manage the parliamentary campaign for kingship, and since he had electioneered heavily in both Ireland and Scotland, republicans had every reason to wish the members for Scotland and Ireland gone.23 The Humble Petition and Advice, with its emphasis on the traditional constitution, replaced the Instrument of Government, but it was the Instrument that had contained parliamentary provision for Scotland and Ireland. Republicans in the last session of Oliver’s second parliament and in the parliament of his son Richard

182   Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658 were therefore able to spend vast amounts of time debating the general issue of whether members for Scotland and Ireland were rightfully present in an English parliament chamber constituted on ancient lines. The Protectorate had fallen before the issue could be resolved. And in the meantime, ‘old English’ republican animosity against Scottish and Irish members had been displayed in an attempt in 1658 to send to the Tower members for Ireland who protested in parliament against the burden of taxation on a nation whose economy had suffered greater devastation than either England’s or Scotland’s.24 Here was a case of familiarity breeding contempt. The mid-century decades were of critical significance for the mutual relations of the three island nations. Rebellion, massacre, expropriation, and emigration set in progress the formation of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ that was to dominate Ireland for over a century and a half, and generated too the powerful narrative of the scheming, murderous, and (most visibly in the form of the papal nuncio of 1645–9, Rinuccini) priest-ridden Catholic that was to be used to justify that ascendancy. Those years also provided incontrovertible evidence of the inability of the Protestants of Ireland to sustain themselves, and their dependence too on massive support from England. Indeed, despite sustained efforts during the 1650s to reduce the size of the garrison—by the middle of the Protectorate the army in Ireland had been cut to about 16,000—the island’s government, military and civil combined, still ran a deficit of about £96,000 p.a. at the time of Oliver’s death.25 It was perhaps no wonder that those resentful voices were raised at Westminster in 1658 against the tax burden on England that Ireland represented. Neither perhaps was it any wonder that, even though Ireland was deemed an incorporated part of the threenation Commonwealth, it was consigned very much to subordinate status. Imports from the colonies had to enter by way of English ports, and Ireland (like London, also suspect to non-presbyterians) remained woefully under-represented in parliament. Scotland may for these few years have received more privileged access than Ireland to England’s trading world, but otherwise its experience was only marginally less harsh. The great witch-hunts of 1649–50 and 1661–2 that bracket Scotland’s conquered decade must be taken at least in part as marks of social and cultural stress; the roots of such stress may be surmised not just in prolonged economic suffering and heavy taxation but in the challenge that the Cromwellian conquest represented to Scotland’s shaping myths of pure kirk and unconquered kingdom. Nor were the English inclined to think better of Scots at the end of the day than they were of the Irish. True, the Scots had not perpetrated massacres but they had invaded England repeatedly in the 1640s; further, at the end of 1646 they had—the cardinal sin in royalist eyes—sold their king into parliamentarian captivity and ultimately sold him to execution. The resentment that slight inspired is palpable in Thomas Hobbes’s likening of it in his Leviathan (1651) to Judas Iscariot’s sale of Christ; he was, in his language and his contempt, far less outspoken than many of his contemporaries.26 English politicians and pamphleteers in the Restoration period derisively took the Scots for granted, and the reports that filtered back from English soldiers in Scotland of the extreme poverty they found there help explain why. General Monck confirmed these in 1658 when he persuaded the Council of State not to raise Scotland’s tax burden further though Scottish revenues consistently covered less than half of expenditures: on the eve of

derek Hirst   183 the Protectorate’s fall in 1659 the Edinburgh administration was running a massive financial deficit of £164,000.27 Scotland was manifestly too poor a country to support a sizeable garrison, though by 1659 that garrison had been reduced to about half the strength of 20,000 or so that had been concentrated in Scotland during Glencairn’s Rising. The inability of an impoverished Scotland and a devastated Ireland to support the troops that holding them seemed to require raised a larger question: the troops could be maintained there if England would bear the burden. England manifestly could bear the burden—it had after all paid much higher taxes in the 1640s when the purposes had been sufficiently clear and urgent to persuade enough people of the need. But would it bear such a burden now? There was no tax-payers’ strike during the Protectorate and the taxes demanded came in right to the end: in that most basic sense, England could have continued to impose its will forcibly on the neighbour nations. But to speak of ‘the taxes demanded’ is to conceal what would in the early modern period have been called an arcanum imperii, a mystery of rule—or, here, of misrule. The republic’s government consistently failed to demand enough taxes. It was too nervous of political opinion in England to provide itself with the resources that would have allowed it to reform Scotland and Ireland as it had hoped to do. Meanwhile, the costs and taxes incurred in holding operations in Scotland and Ireland, a huge factor in the state’s budget—throughout the Protectorate, close to two-thirds of the entire army establishment was serving in Scotland and Ireland—were quite sufficient to justify the government’s nervousness about English opinion.28 Far more than the navy, whose purposes were generally accepted and which vied with the army in cost, it was the fiscal burden of the army, and thus in effect the cost of Scotland and Ireland, that destabilized the Protector’s relations with his parliaments and that frustrated the prospects of a Cromwellian settlement in England. The cycle that began with the Covenanters’ revolt in 1638 and the protests against Strafford’s rule in Ireland two years later was a vicious one indeed. Scottish and Irish resentments at the imposition from England of alien priorities brought down the Stuart regime in the early 1640s; continuing Scottish and Irish restiveness gave Charles I the false hopes that plunged England in 1648–9 into its revolutionary moment. Although the republic’s rulers built a military machine that could hold Scotland and Ireland with ease, they found the price of that was the steady alienation of an English public that had in the aftermath of Worcester seemed briefly to be with them. Like his royal predecessor, Cromwell occasionally believed that he might bind the three nations together; like Charles, he learned that what they chiefly shared was a mutual repugnance.

Notes 1. Norah Carlin, ‘The Levellers and the Conquest of Ireland in 1649’, Historical Journal [HJ], 30 (1987): 269–88. 2. John Morrill, ‘The Drogheda Massacre in Cromwellian Context’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007), 242–65.

184   Security and Reform in England’s Other Nations, 1649–1658 3. Thomas Carlyle and S. C. Lomas (eds.), The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 3 vols. (London, 1904), II, 5–23. 4. ‘Axtell, Daniel (bap. 1622, d. 1660)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 5. John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, HJ, 53 (2010): 919–37. 6. Kevin McKenny, ‘The Restoration Land Settlement in Ireland: A Statistical Interpretation’, in Coleman A.  Dennehy (ed.), Restoration Ireland:  Always Settling and Never Settled (Aldershot, 2008), 35–52. 7. John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in Crisis:  1652 Revisited’, Parliamentary History, 30 (2011): 193–214. 8. Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), 676. 9. Karl R. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The Adventurers in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971); Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms 1638–1652 (Harlow, 2007), 410–11. 10. For all matters of reform in Ireland, see Toby Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland:  English Government and Reform in Ireland 1649–1660 (Oxford, 1975). 11. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, 153–68. 12. Crawford Gribben, God’s Irishmen:  Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford, 2007). 13. Carlyle and Lomas (eds.), Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, II, 125–33. 14. Derek Hirst, ‘The English Republic and the Meaning of Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 66 (1994), 474. 15. For a broad comparison, see David Stevenson, ‘Cromwell, Scotland and Ireland’, in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990), 149–80. 16. Patrick Little, ‘The Irish and Scottish Councils and the Dislocation of the Protectoral Union’, in Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007), 117–43. 17. R.  Scott Spurlock, Cromwell and Scotland:  Conquest and Religion, 1650–1660 (Edinburgh, 2007). 18. Julia Buckroyd, ‘Lord Broghill and the Scottish Church, 1655–1656’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976): 359–68. 19. Leslie M. Smith, ‘Scotland and Cromwell: A Study in Early Modern Government’ (unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1987), 72, 202; Leslie M. Smith, ‘Sackcloth for the Sinner or Punishment for the Crime: Church and Secular Courts in Cromwellian Scotland’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason, and Alexander Murdoch (eds.), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982), 116–32. 20. Smith, ‘Scotland and Cromwell’, 120, 163. 21. Hirst, ‘English Republic’, 481. 22. Toby Barnard, ‘Planters and Policies in Cromwellian Ireland’, Past and Present, 61 (1973): 31–69. 23. Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004). 24. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 672; Gentles, English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 433–56. 25. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, 27. 26. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 3. 27. Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, 219.

derek Hirst   185 28. For the distribution of troops (more broadly than its title suggests), see Henry Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2013).

Further Reading Barnard, Toby, Cromwellian Ireland:  English Government and Reform in Ireland 1649–1660 (Oxford, 1975). Barnard, Toby, The Kingdom of Ireland, 1641–1760 (Basingstoke, 2004). Bottigheimer, Karl R., English Money and Irish Land:  The Adventurers in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971). Coffey, John, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions:  The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge, 1997). Dow, Frances D., Cromwellian Scotland 1651–1660 (Edinburgh, 1979). Gribben, Crawford, God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford, 2007). Little, Patrick, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004). Macinnes, Allan I., The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, c.1607–1661 (Edinburgh, 2010). Macinnes, Allan I., The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005). Moody, T. W., F. X. Martin, and T. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland. Vol. 3. Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976). Ohlmeyer, Jane H. (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1995). Siochrú, Micheál Ó, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008). Spurlock, R. Scott, Cromwell and Scotland: Conquest and Religion, 1650–1660 (Edinburgh, 2007). Wheeler, Scott, The Irish and British Wars, 1637–1654 (London, 2002). Woolrych, Austin, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002).

Chapter 11

English P ol i t i c s in the 1650s David L. Smith

Introduction As Philip Baker argued in his chapter in this volume,1 the regicide was brought about by a determined minority who could see no other way of achieving a lasting settlement than to remove Charles I and abolish the monarchy. The New Model Army played a pivotal role in this process, and the army remained crucially important throughout the 1650s. In a sense, the republic was never able to escape the circumstances of its birth, and English politics during that decade were characterized by constant tension between army leaders and civilian politicians. These two elements needed each other but found it extremely difficult to work together. Only Oliver Cromwell had sufficient stature within each camp to hold them in some sort of equilibrium, and this ability to bridge the two worlds is the key to his remarkable political dominance during the Interregnum. This chapter will explore the political consequences of this troubled relationship between the army leadership and the civilians. Christopher Hill once wrote that ‘the Protectorate was sitting on bayonets, and not much else’, and his comment holds good for the Commonwealth as well.2 Conscious that those who had actively sought Charles I’s trial and execution were never more than a minority of the population, the leading civilians of the republic needed the army’s protection. It was the army that had brought the republic into being and that safeguarded it throughout the 1650s. In the end, only Oliver Cromwell proved equal to the task of balancing the competing political pressures of civilians and officers, and following his death in September 1658, the disparate elements of the republic fell apart within less than two years. The final irony was that it was a section of the army leadership that was responsible for the destruction of the republic and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. What the army had created, the army ultimately destroyed.

david l. Smith   187

The Creation of the Commonwealth The Commonwealth took some months to establish. Following the king’s execution, the Rump parliament voted on 7 February to abolish the monarchy in England and Ireland as ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, safety and public interest of the people’. The previous day, it had voted to abolish the House of Lords as ‘useless and dangerous’. These two votes were translated into Acts of Parliament on 17 and 19 March respectively. On 13 February the executive functions of monarchy were vested in a Council of State to be elected annually by—and predominantly from among—members of parliament. It was not, however, until 19 May that an Act was passed declaring that England and ‘all the dominions and territories thereunto belonging’ were ‘a Commonwealth and Free State’ to be governed ‘by the supreme authority of this nation, the representatives of the people in Parliament, . . . and that without any King or House of Lords’. On 2 January 1650, all adult males were required to take an Engagement declaring that they would be ‘true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords’, and on 17 July a further Act rounded off the creation of the Commonwealth by making it treason to deny the ‘supreme authority’ of the Commons.3 The Rump now faced the challenge of what to do with this ‘supreme authority’. Although roughly 210 members sat at some stage between January 1649 and the Rump’s dissolution in April 1653, only about sixty or seventy were at all active and average attendances were usually between fifty and sixty.4 Members could readily agree on issues of immediate concern, such as security and defence. They were able to make common cause in supporting the conquests of Ireland (1649–50) and Scotland (1650–1) and on measures against continental enemies, such as the Navigation Act of October 1651 which was targeted against the Dutch Republic.5 Where the Rumpers became seriously divided was over how far to promote positive domestic reforms, especially in the areas of religion and the law. On religion, the most significant reform was the Toleration Act of September 1650, which abolished compulsory attendance at parish churches. But conservative opinion was reluctant to abandon the parish system or to grant further concessions to religious radicals, and stern measures were passed against blasphemy and adultery.6 As for the law, a special Commission on Law Reform, chaired by Sir Matthew Hale, proposed far-reaching reforms of the legal system in 1652, but these were strongly opposed by the professional lawyers among the Rumpers.7 In general, the Rump gave priority to urgent matters, such as finance, taxation, and defence, rather than to more fundamental reforms. A representative sample of 131 Acts passed in the periods January–May 1649, January–May 1651, and 1 January–20 April 1653 reveals that seventy-four dealt with matters of security, finance, or taxation, forty-three with local government or the army, and fourteen with social problems. Only six were concerned with economic and social reform, five with religious issues, and three with law reform.8 The Rump’s energies gradually waned. The number of Acts passed steadily

188   English Politics in the 1650s fell, from 124 in 1649 to seventy-eight in 1650, fifty-four in 1651, forty-four in 1652, and ten between 1 January and 20 April 1653. The corresponding figures for the number of committees appointed to draft new legislation showed a similar decline: 152, ninety-eight, sixty-one, fifty-one, twelve.9 The Rump was, in John Morrill’s words, ‘a body that lived from hand to mouth’ and ‘fended off its problems’.10

The Downfall of the Rump Parliament For the army leaders, the Rump’s performance was profoundly disappointing. Cromwell’s conquests of Ireland and Scotland in 1649–51 made him ever more conscious of parliament’s responsibilities, and he became increasingly preoccupied with three questions: was the Rump discharging its duties to God’s cause and people; when would it dissolve itself; and how would it make provision for a successor parliament that would be sympathetic to the godly cause? On all three issues, Cromwell’s frustration with the Rump steadily mounted. On 4 September 1651, the day after his victory at Worcester, Cromwell wrote to the Speaker of the Rump, William Lenthall, expressing the hope that this ‘crowning mercy’ would ‘provoke those that are concerned in it to thankfulness, and the Parliament to do the will of Him who hath done His will for it, and for the nation’. Cromwell urged ‘that the fear of the Lord, even for His mercies, may keep an authority and a people so prospered, and blessed, and witnessed unto, humble and faithful, and that justice and righteousness, mercy and truth may flow from you, as a thankful return to our gracious God’.11 In Cromwell’s view, however, the Rumpers conspicuously failed to make such a ‘thankful return’, and he pressed them to set a date by which they would end their sitting. After much dragging of feet, in November 1651 the Rumpers agreed that the parliament would dissolve itself no later than 3 November 1654. This then raised the question of what body would succeed it, and in August 1652 the army petitioned the Rump ‘that for public satisfaction of the good people of this nation, speedy consideration may be had of such qualifications for future and successive Parliaments as tend to the election only of such as are pious and faithful to the interest of the Commonwealth, to sit and serve as members in the said Parliament’.12 To that end, from the following October Cromwell convened a series of meetings between leading Rumpers and army officers to discuss a bill for a ‘new representative’.13 Eventually, on 19 April 1653, Cromwell believed that he had secured an agreement whereby the Rump would dissolve itself and transfer authority to an interim council of officers and MPs which would then organize fresh elections in which former royalists and ‘Presbyters and neuters’ would be disqualified. The following day, however, the Rump rejected this plan for a temporary council and decided instead to hold immediate elections. Concerned that these elections might take place without adequate safeguards to exclude the ungodly, Cromwell rushed to Westminster with a body of troops, berated the members, telling them that ‘you have sat too long here for any good you have been doing lately’, and then dissolved the Rump.14 Two days later, he published a declaration15 in which he argued that ‘the Parliament had

david l. Smith   189 opportunity . . . to settle a due liberty both in reference to civil and spiritual things’, and ‘to proceed vigorously in reforming what was amiss in government, and to the settling of the Commonwealth upon a foundation of justice and righteousness’. Instead of doing these things, Cromwell complained, the Rumpers had acted ‘with much bitterness and opposition to the people of God, and his spirit acting in them’, and he also claimed (probably wrongly)16 that they had a desire ‘of perpetuating themselves in the supreme government’. Cromwell asserted that the Rump would ‘never answer those ends which God, his people, and the whole nation expected from them’, and that ‘the interest of all honest men and of this glorious cause had been in danger to be laid in the dust’. He insisted that it was his duty ‘to call to the government persons of approved fidelity and honesty’ in the belief ‘that if persons so qualified be chosen, the fruits of a just and righteous reformation, so long prayed and wished for, will, by the blessing of God, be in due time obtained’. As he later argued, the Rump had committed ‘an high breach of trust’ and to dissolve it was therefore ‘as necessary to be done as the preservation of this cause’.17

Barebone’s Parliament Cromwell’s dramatic dissolution of the Rump left him arguably more powerful than at any other time in his career, either before or afterwards.18 He and the Army Council chose to adopt a scheme proposed by one of the officers, the Fifth Monarchist Major-General Thomas Harrison, for a nominated assembly, often known as Barebone’s Parliament.19 Cromwell apparently envisaged this as an interim assembly that would sit no later than 3 November 1654, by which time he hoped the nation would be sufficiently settled to resume electing regular parliaments.20 He opened it on 4 July 1653 with an exhilarated speech in which he told members that ‘God hath called you to this work by, I think, as wonderful providences as ever passed upon the sons of men in so short a time. . . . It’s come, therefore, to you by the way of necessity; by the wise Providence of God . . . Therefore, own your call!’21 Over the weeks that followed, however, Barebone’s became more and more divided, especially over how far to pursue reform of religion and the law. The members could agree on a range of social, administrative, and financial issues and they passed in all nearly thirty Acts on these matters. However, members were quite diverse in their religious and political views, and they differed over which reforms to prioritize and how rapidly to proceed.22 The forty members with some legal training were alarmed when a majority voted to abolish the Court of Chancery and to codify the English common law into a pocket-sized digest. More moderate members deplored a vote to suppress lay rights to nominate the ministers of parishes, seeing it as a threat to property. The final straw came on 10 December, when members voted by the narrowest of margins (fifty-six votes to fifty-four) to abolish tithes, many of which were paid to the laity. Two days later, nearly eighty moderate members exploited the absence of many of their more radical colleagues at a prayer meeting and voted ‘to deliver up unto the Lord General Cromwell the powers which they had received from him’.23

190   English Politics in the 1650s Cromwell professed surprise at this outcome, but he appears to have had few regrets. Later he described Barebone’s as ‘a story of my own weakness and folly’.24 He and his fellow officers had become increasingly concerned that Barebone’s was hostile towards the army. In an effort to reduce the tax burden on England, members voted not to renew the excise, and they then turned to review the monthly assessment, which was the main source of financial support for the army. Some radicals even suggested that senior officers should serve for a year without pay.25 It was against this background of growing antagonism between the army and Barebone’s that Major-General John Lambert began, from mid-October 1653, to draft a new paper constitution, the Instrument of Government.26 This drew on earlier army terms, especially the Heads of the Proposals (1647) and the Officers’ Agreement of the People (1649).27 Lambert initially hoped that Cromwell would accept the title of King, but he steadfastly refused and so instead the Instrument made him Lord Protector for life. Following the demise of Barebone’s, the Army Council adopted the Instrument on 15 December and the following day, wearing a plain black suit and cloak, Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector in Westminster Hall.28

The Establishment of the Protectorate The terms of the Instrument reflected its army origins, and Barry Coward has written that ‘running through the new constitution is an intense distrust of Parliaments’.29 Conversely, many of the former Rumpers who had strongly supported the Commonwealth—figures like Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Sir Henry Vane, Thomas Scott, and John Bradshaw—were appalled at the establishment of the Protectorate, and at what they saw as Cromwell’s betrayal of the causes of godliness and liberty for the sake of his own ambition.30 In May 1654, John Milton published The Second Defence of the People of England in which he warned Cromwell: ‘if that man than whom no one has been considered more just, more holy, more excellent, shall afterwards attack that liberty which he himself has defended, such an act must necessarily be dangerous and well-nigh fatal not only to liberty itself but also to the cause of all virtue and piety’.31 Cromwell and his fellow officers had imposed a new written constitution, but at the cost of alienating significant numbers of civilian Commonwealthsmen. The Instrument’s provisions for the election and composition of parliaments are discussed more fully below.32 Here it is worth emphasising how much the new constitution reflected the army’s priorities, especially concerning religious liberty of conscience and the maintenance of a standing army. On the first of these issues, the Instrument stipulated that ‘such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgement from the doctrine, worship or discipline publicly held forth) shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and exercise of their religion’,

david l. Smith   191 provided that ‘they abuse not this liberty to the civil injury of others and to the actual disturbance of the public peace on their parts’, and that ‘this liberty’ would not be ‘extended to Popery or Prelacy, nor to such as, under the profession of Christ, hold forth and practise licentiousness’. On the second issue, ‘a constant yearly revenue’ was to be raised to support ‘10,000 horse and dragoons, and 20,000 foot, in England, Scotland and Ireland’, plus £200,000 per annum for defraying the other necessary charges of administration of justice, and other expenses of the Government’, terms that could not be altered ‘but by the consent of the Lord Protector and the Parliament’.33 These religious and military arrangements would later cause friction in the Protectorate parliaments, as would the extent of the powers vested in the Lord Protector and the Council of State.34 The Instrument scheduled the first Protectorate parliament to meet in September 1654 and until then the Lord Protector and Council of State could issue ordinances with the force of law but subject to parliamentary ratification. They used this power to produce about a hundred and eighty ordinances addressing a wide range of financial and administrative issues.35 Among the most notable were those uniting England and Scotland, reforming Chancery, and establishing a High Court of Justice. Perhaps even closer to Cromwell’s heart were the ordinances relating to the settlement of religion, especially the creation of a national body of ‘triers’ to examine all new ministers before allowing them to preach, and county commissions of ‘ejectors’ to remove ‘scandalous, ignorant and insufficient ministers and schoolmasters’.36 Cromwell hoped that the first Protectorate parliament would confirm and build on these measures, but he was to be bitterly disappointed.

The First Protectorate Parliament Cromwell opened the parliament on 4 September with a speech full of optimism. He told members that they had upon their shoulders ‘the interest of all the Christian people in the world’: the parliament offered ‘a door of hope’, and that one of its ‘great ends’ was ‘that this ship of the Commonwealth may be brought into a safe harbour’.37 Instead of adopting the Instrument as he had hoped, however, the parliament began to debate a series of amendments that would strengthen its own powers, and also established an Assembly of Divines to give advice on religious reforms and measures against radical religious sects. On 11 September, they voted that government should be ‘in a Parliament and single person limited and restrained as the Parliament should think fit’. The following day, Cromwell ordered the House to be locked and guarded by soldiers, and gave a lengthy speech outlining four ‘fundamentals’ of government that he regarded as non-negotiable: that parliaments should not sit perpetually and should be elected frequently; ‘government by a single person and a Parliament’; ‘liberty of conscience’ in religion; and shared control of the militia between parliament and the Lord Protector. He then insisted that before they could resume their seats members had to subscribe a Recognition affirming their loyalty to the Lord Protector and to the principle of

192   English Politics in the 1650s ‘government by a single person and a Parliament’. At this point, between fifty and eighty members, including prominent Commonwealthsmen such as Hesilrige, Scott, and Bradshaw, withdrew in protest.38 The depleted House nevertheless pressed ahead with drafting a Parliamentary Constitution intended to strengthen parliament’s powers and reduce those of the Lord Protector and the Council of State. This took the form of a ‘constitutional bill’ which included the provision that parliaments could not be adjourned, prorogued, or dissolved without their own consent, and the assertion of greater parliamentary control over the militia.39 Many of the powers of the Council of State were to be transferred to parliament, and demands for a considerable reduction in the armed forces were only narrowly defeated. In particular, the Parliamentary Constitution sought to reduce the legislative powers of the Lord Protector by limiting his veto over parliamentary bills.40 The majority of members were of presbyterian sympathies: they wanted to strengthen the provision and maintenance of a national ministry and were deeply fearful of extending liberty of conscience any further. As a result, the Parliamentary Constitution contained a clause that ‘such bills as shall be agreed upon by the Parliament, for the restraining of atheism, blasphemy, damnable heresies, to be particularly enumerated by this Parliament, popery, prelacy, licentiousness, or profaneness’ were to become law ‘within twenty days after their presentation to the Lord Protector, although he shall not give his consent thereunto’.41 The parliament prepared about forty bills in addition to the Parliamentary Constitution, on subjects as diverse as probate of wills and the management of saltpetre.42 However, members’ energies were primarily devoted to the ‘constitutional bill’ and it was this, above all, that made Cromwell determined to be rid of the parliament at the earliest possible moment. The Instrument of Government had specified that parliaments should sit for a minimum of five months.43 Cromwell chose to interpret this not as five calendar months but as five lunar months, lasting until 22 January, and on that date he dissolved the parliament. His lengthy speech on that occasion denounced members for having missed opportunities to ‘have given a just liberty to godly men of different judgments’ and ‘to have settled peace and quietness amongst all professing godliness’. Instead, he complained, ‘dissettlement and division, discontent and dissatisfaction, together with real dangers to the whole, has been more multiplied within these five months of your sitting, than in some years before’. He concluded: ‘I think it my duty to tell you that it is not for the profit of these nations, nor fit for the common and public good, for you to continue here any longer’.44

The Major-Generals Cromwell’s angry dissolution of the first Protectorate parliament got 1655 off to a bad start, and there was worse news to come. In March an abortive royalist rising in Wiltshire, led by Sir John Penruddock, unnerved the government and showed that royalism, though defeated, was not dead. Then, in July, came news that the Western Design—Cromwell’s

david l. Smith   193 campaign against Spanish power in the West Indies—had suffered a serious defeat.45 The combination of all these developments convinced Cromwell and the Council of State that a major new policy was necessary. In August it was decided that England and Wales should be divided into ten (later eleven) regions, each ruled by a Major-General. Impatient with parliaments, the army was to take direct control of government. The first duty of the Major-Generals was to preserve security. They were instructed to suppress ‘all tumults, insurrections, rebellions or other unlawful assemblies’, to disarm ‘all papists and others who have been in arms against the Parliament’, and to arrest all ‘thieves, robbers, highwaymen and other dangerous persons’. To achieve these goals, they were authorized to raise new regional militias totalling 6,000 horse paid for by a Decimation Tax, a 10 per cent income tax on all former royalists. The Major-Generals had a second purpose as well, which was to promote what Cromwell called a ‘reformation of manners’ in the localities. They were to ‘encourage and promote godliness and virtue, and discourage and discountenance all profaneness and ungodliness’, and to enforce ‘the laws against drunkenness, blaspheming, and taking of the name of God in vain, by swearing and cursing, plays and interludes, and profaning the Lord’s Day, and such like wickedness and abominations’. Horse-races, cock-fighting, bear-baiting, stage-plays and ‘any unlawful assemblies’ were banned, as were alehouses ‘except such as are necessary and convenient to travellers’.46 This was military rule with a strong moral dimension. Cromwell later praised the Major-Generals as ‘justifiable as to necessity, and honest in every respect’, and he claimed that they were ‘more effectual towards the discountenancing of vice and settling religion than anything done these fifty years’.47 Historians have generally been less positive and have suggested that their impact was at best patchy. In the most detailed account of this episode, Christopher Durston argued that the Major-Generals achieved some success in improving security but that in terms of ‘creating a more godly society’ they ‘failed unequivocally’.48 Their remit was too extensive, and they were not given enough time or support, for them to make more than very slow progress towards godly reformation. In those regions where they found sympathetic local commissioners, for example in Staffordshire, they had some success, but in much of England popular enthusiasm for Cromwell’s vision was distinctly limited.49 What was common to virtually all areas, however, was an intense dislike of military rule. When Cromwell’s plans for further campaigns against Spain together with the continuing costs of military rule forced him to call another parliament to meet in September 1656, the elections were dominated by cries of ‘no swordsmen, no decimators’ and they produced a parliament strongly opposed to the Major-Generals.50

The Second Protectorate Parliament In an effort to counteract this outcome, the Council of State, acting on advice from the Major-Generals, excluded just over a hundred members before the parliament assembled, whereupon a further sixty or so immediately withdrew in protest.51 Among those

194   English Politics in the 1650s excluded were significant numbers of Commonwealthsmen, such as Hesilrige and Scott, as well as presbyterians, like John Birch and John Bulkeley, who had obstructed the extension of liberty of conscience in 1654–5. Yet these exclusions and withdrawals did not make the new parliament any more malleable. In his opening speech on 17 September 1656, Cromwell hoped that members would unite against what he called the ‘natural enemy’ of Spain, and that they would ‘knit together in one bond’ to ‘suppress everything that is evil and encourage whatsoever is of godliness’.52 Instead, however, they soon began to address two particular areas of concern—liberty of conscience and the powers of the Major-Generals—both of which put them on collision course with Cromwell and his fellow officers. The first of these issues came to a head in a remarkable way with the case of a Quaker, James Nayler, who in October 1656 re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday by riding into Bristol on a horse, with his supporters shouting hosannas and throwing garments in his path. Members were deeply divided over how to proceed against him—whether by legislation or by judicial procedure—and over how severe a sentence to impose. During December there were lengthy debates about Nayler’s fate, in which the more lenient speakers included army officers such as Lambert, Desborough, and Sydenham. By contrast, prominent civilian presbyterians like Sir William Strickland, Thomas Bampfield, and Thomas Beake, were among those who urged that Nayler be put to death. The case revealed widespread fears of ‘errors, heresies and blasphemies’ in general, and particularly of Quakers, who Sir William Strickland described as ‘a growing evil, and the greatest that ever was’. Eventually, the House voted to impose savage corporal punishments on Nayler but to spare his life. Cromwell did not interfere in these debates, but he did query the ‘grounds and reasons whereupon they have proceeded’, and he increasingly wondered whether another chamber might be needed to act as ‘a check or balancing power’ on the Commons.53 Parliament’s second major concern was the influence of the army. On 25 December 1656, Major-General Desborough introduced a Militia Bill that would have perpetuated the Major-Generals and the Decimation Tax. This provoked howls of protest from civilian members. Many argued that the Decimation Tax violated the Rump’s Act of Oblivion (1652) which had granted a general pardon to former royalists. John Trevor spoke for many when he complained that the Militia Bill would ‘cantonize the nation’ by sanctioning ‘a power that was never set up in any nation without dangerous consequences’. In parliament, and even within the Council of State, officers and civilians found themselves bitterly at odds over the Bill. The House refused to vote £400,000 towards further campaigns against Spain until after the Bill was defeated, to the intense annoyance of the Major-Generals and other officers, on 29 January 1657.54 These divisions became even worse over the weeks that followed. In a bid to curtail the Lord Protector’s powers and reduce the army’s influence, on 23 February a group of civilians led by Lord Broghill, the Secretary of State John Thurloe, Bulstrode Whitelocke, and Nathaniel Fiennes presented a new written constitution to Cromwell in the form of a Remonstrance. This urged him ‘to assume the name, style, title, dignity and office of King of England, Scotland and Ireland’. By assuming the ancient office of

david l. Smith   195 King, Cromwell’s powers would have been more clearly defined and less open-ended than those he wielded as Lord Protector. The Remonstrance further requested that ‘the ancient and undoubted liberties and privileges of Parliament . . . be preserved and maintained’. Parliament’s powers were to be strengthened at the expense of those of the Council of State, for example in relation to the exclusion of members. A second chamber would be established, known as the Other House, containing between forty and seventy members, and any who died or were ‘legally removed’ were to be replaced ‘by consent of the House itself ’. Liberty of conscience was not to be extended to ‘such who publish horrible blasphemies or practise or hold forth licentiousness or profaneness under the profession of Christ’.55 This Remonstrance, and specifically its offer of the kingship, presented Cromwell with the most difficult dilemma of his career, and he agonized for over two months before reaching a decision.

The Kingship Crisis The Remonstrance was a civilian attempt to curb the powers of Cromwell and the army, and it provoked a major political battle between the civilian and military interests. This battle was focused on the question of whether or not Cromwell would become king, and as he struggled to make up his mind he was lobbied by competing groups. The supporters of the Remonstrance argued that it would establish a constitutional monarchy—with powers similar to those of Charles I in 1641–2—that would safeguard the people’s liberties and secure the long-term stability of the regime.56 They were conscious that Miles Sindercombe’s recent attempts to assassinate Cromwell had provided a stark reminder of how much the Protectorate depended on one man’s life.57 Aware of Cromwell’s aversion to the hereditary principle, the authors of the Remonstrance had sweetened the pill with a clause allowing him to nominate his own successor.58 By contrast, the most concerted resistance to the Remonstrance came from senior army officers, especially Lambert, Desborough, Sydenham, and Fleetwood, who insisted that it would be a betrayal of all that they had fought for in the civil wars. They correctly saw it as a serious threat to the army’s influence in government and threatened to resign their commissions if Cromwell accepted the kingship.59 It was testimony to how successfully Cromwell had thus far managed to straddle the worlds of the officers and the civilians that he found it so desperately difficult to adjudicate between these conflicting lines of advice. In a series of speeches to parliamentary representatives between late March and early May, he pondered the pros and cons of the offer, probing whether it was ‘necessary’ or merely ‘convenient’ for him to become king, and if it would be offensive to God and to ‘good men’ for him to take a title that he felt had been providentially ‘laid aside’.60 On 13 April, he memorably declared that ‘God hath seemed providentially . . . not only to strike at the family but at the name . . . I will not seek to set up that that providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again’.61 Finally, on 8 May he gave his definitive answer: he was ‘not to

196   English Politics in the 1650s be convinced of the necessity of that thing that hath been so often insisted on by you, to wit, the title of king’, and therefore ‘I cannot undertake this government with that title of king’.62 In reaching this decision, the army leaders’ opposition probably weighed very heavily with him. It is also likely, as Blair Worden has argued, that he was extremely sensitive to possible accusations of greed and ambition, and that he was haunted by the wounding charge of committing the ‘sin of Achan’ that Vane had levelled against him the previous year in A Healing Question Propounded.63 With the question of the kingship settled, the other sections of the Remonstrance were adopted in slightly revised form in a new written constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice, the central principle of which remained the strengthening of parliament at the expense of both Protector and Council.64 The quasi-monarchical character of this new constitution was reinforced by the renaming of the Council of State as the Privy Council.65 When Cromwell was reinstalled as Lord Protector in Westminster Hall on 26 June, he was invested with ‘a robe of purple velvet, lined with ermine, being the habit anciently used at the solemn investiture of princes’, together with a bible, a sword and ‘a scepter, being of massie gold’. After taking his oath of office, he was proclaimed Lord Protector, whereupon ‘the trumpets sounded, and the people made several great acclamations with loud shouts, God save the Lord Protector’. Then, ‘in his princely habit’, he departed in ‘his coach of state’.66 Cromwell now had all the trappings of a king, except the title and the crown.

Oliver Cromwell’s Final Months The underlying tensions within the regime persisted through the remaining fourteen months of Cromwell’s life. The end of military rule brought a degree of stability, but at the cost of alienating the army leaders who resented the Humble Petition and Advice as a civilian constitution which reduced their influence and curtailed liberty of conscience. The Commonwealthsmen remained implacably hostile to the Protectorate. These issues came to a head in the brief second session of the second Protectorate parliament which lasted just two weeks in January–February 1658. The Humble Petition had not continued the Council’s power to exclude members of parliament of whom it disapproved. As a result, about twenty of the members excluded in 1656 returned to the House, including Hesilrige and Scott. Cromwell had also nominated to the Other House some of his most senior army colleagues, such as Fleetwood, Desborough, and Sydenham. These two developments made the Commons much more difficult to manage and there was soon a major revolt, led by the Commonwealthsmen, against recognizing the Other House.67 In an attempt to quell this, Cromwell delivered a lengthy speech on 25 January in which he warned of the dangers that faced the country both at home and abroad. He deplored the ‘calamities and divisions among’ the nation and asked members: ‘What is the general spirit of this nation? . . . What is it that possesseth every sect? What is it? That every sect may be uppermost!’ He complained that ‘it were a happy thing if the nation

david l. Smith   197 would be content with rule’, for ‘misrule is better than no rule; and an ill government, a bad one, better than none’. Then, in an extraordinary image, he lamented that so many people were ‘not only making wounds, but widening those already made, as if we should see one making wounds in a man’s side, and would desire nothing more than to be groping and groveling with his fingers in those wounds’.68 His rhetoric was to no avail. The House became entangled in a fractious debate over the Other House and on 4 February, convinced that the parliament was ‘not to be satisfied’, Cromwell dissolved it.69 This was the last time that Cromwell addressed a parliament. Over the weeks that followed his health and morale deteriorated, and he died on 3 September 1658. In death, he was treated as a king in all but name. For his lying in state at Somerset House, an effigy of Cromwell was made, wearing ‘a kirtle robe of purple velvet, laced with a rich gold lace, and furr’d with ermins’. The effigy held a sceptre in one hand and an orb in the other and behind its head was ‘a rich chair of estate of cloth of gold tissued’ on which stood ‘the imperial crown set with stones’.70 Cromwell’s funeral in Westminster Abbey was modelled on that of James VI and I in 1625, and for this his effigy was ‘vested with royal robes, a scepter in one hand, a globe in the other, and a crown on the head’.71 The regality of the lying in state and funeral prompted criticism from Commonwealthsmen such as Edmund Ludlow who castigated ‘this folly and profusion’.72 Behind the monarchical ceremonial there lurked a familiar power struggle. It was announced that on his deathbed Cromwell had nominated his eldest son as his successor, and Richard Cromwell was duly proclaimed Lord Protector on 4 September. Jonathan Fitzgibbons has recently argued that Cromwell may not in fact have nominated Richard and that instead the Privy Council may have chosen Richard as the most suitable and least contentious candidate and then claimed that he was his father’s choice.73 This is a plausible reading of the surviving evidence, and it would certainly make sense in terms of the continuing tensions between the civilian and military interests. A candidate from among the army officers, such as Fleetwood, would have been wholly unacceptable to the civilians. Richard, by contrast, was attractive to civilians while also being acceptable to officers who thought they could control him. To a Council that was deeply divided and finely balanced between officers and civilians, he seemed an appealing compromise candidate. Once again, however, the cracks in the regime had only been papered over, not removed.

Richard Cromwell and the Fall of the Protectorate In recent years, historians have tended to take a more positive view of Richard Cromwell’s viability as Lord Protector, and to argue that his downfall was not inevitable. Although aged only thirty-one when he took office, he demonstrated energy and political ability, and his presbyterian sympathies enabled him to win the support of some who

198   English Politics in the 1650s had viewed his father with suspicion. He was more cautious than Oliver about extending liberty of conscience, and had even advocated the death sentence for Nayler. This helped him to build bridges with the presbyterians who were much more supportive of Richard than they had been of his father. Richard’s greatest problems were with the army (which had reservations about his civilian background) and the Commonwealthsmen (who had always disliked the Protectorate), and it was an alliance between these two elements that ultimately brought down first Richard and then the Protectorate itself in April–May 1659.74 Although the army officers had acquiesced in Richard’s appointment as Lord Protector they remained sceptical about his lack of military experience and never regarded him as one of their own as they had his father. Considerable tensions persisted within the Privy Council between the civilian and military interests. Richard’s strongest supporters were the civilians, led by Thurloe, Nathaniel Fiennes, and the Lord President Henry Lawrence. By contrast, the military element, including Fleetwood and Desborough, while pledging loyalty to Richard, obstructed his attempt to strengthen the civilian presence on the Council by the appointments of Lords Broghill and Fauconberg. These tensions came to a head when Richard—facing a total state debt of nearly £2.5 million and army arrears of £890,000—summoned a parliament to meet in late January 1659.75 With the Council powerless to exclude any of those who were elected, a significant number of Commonwealthsmen were returned, including Hesilrige and Scott, and Richard also preserved his father’s composition of the Other House, which kept some of his ablest allies out of the Commons.76 Nevertheless, this parliament was by no means doomed to failure. Members of all complexions expressed their loyalty to Richard, and the support of presbyterian members enabled him to defeat the resistance of the Commonwealthsmen on several key issues, including the recognition of him as Lord Protector, the legitimacy of the Other House, and the presence of Irish and Scottish members in the Commons. By March 1659 it seemed that events were steadily moving in Richard’s favour. Behind the scenes, however, an alliance against Richard was developing between army leaders, especially Fleetwood and Desborough, and Commonwealthsmen like Hesilrige and Scott, who remained entrenched in their antipathy towards the Protectorate. The officers felt that Richard, a civilian of presbyterian attitudes, was far less sympathetic to their interests than his father had been. In particular, they deplored his reluctance either to guarantee payment of their arrears or to discuss their grievances with any degree of urgency. When, in early April, the officers submitted a representation of their case to Richard, he initially ordered Fleetwood to suppress it and only forwarded it to the Houses with great reluctance. Instead of discussing it, the Commons resolved that the Army Council should not meet while the parliament was sitting and they then began to debate settling the armed forces as a militia, possibly under parliamentary control, which was precisely what the officers most feared. At this point, the power struggle between the military and civilian interests came dramatically into the open. On 21 April, Fleetwood and Desborough demanded the parliament’s immediate dissolution and the recall of the Rump. The army ordered a rendezvous at St James’s, whereupon Richard tried to organize a counter-rendezvous which

david l. Smith   199 proved a disastrous failure. The next day the parliament was dispersed under threat of military force and on 24 May Richard resigned as Lord Protector.77 The fall of the Protectorate was not inevitable. The army coup that broke it came about for essentially short-term reasons, and if Richard had been granted longer to build up a base of civilian support centred on the presbyterians he might have been in a stronger position to face down the alliance of army officers and Commonwealthsmen that confronted him. That said, the coup of April–May 1659 marked the latest dramatic episode in a struggle between civilian and military interests whose origins can be traced back to the very beginning of the Interregnum and the circumstances of the republic’s birth.

The Collapse of the Republic Tim Harris examines the complex series of events that led from the fall of the Protectorate to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in May 1660 below.78 The theme I want to highlight in this section is the continuing, and eventually fatal, instability that lay at the heart of the relationship between civilian politicians and army officers. With the end of the Protectorate, the army officers held the political initiative, and during the last twelve months of the Interregnum they tried to establish a civilian regime that would safeguard both their own interests and the ‘good old cause’ for which they had fought. These attempts proved vain, and ultimately the only solution they could find was to restore Charles II.79 Initially, the army officers tried to work with their Commonwealthsmen allies in the restored Rump, but they soon tired of the latter’s failure to provide for army arrears and their reluctance to extend liberty of conscience. In early October, Desborough presented a Humble Representation and Petition of the Officers of the Army urging the Rump to safeguard the army’s interests. Instead the Rump pressed ahead with an Act nullifying all legislation passed since April 1653. At this point the officers’ patience ran out and they dissolved the Rump on 13 October. General George Monck, leader of the army in Scotland, demanded the recall of the Rump, but instead the Army Council established a Committee of Safety, chaired by Fleetwood, to ‘secure the people’s liberties as men and Christians, reform the law, provide for a godly preaching ministry, and settle the constitution without a single person or a House of Lords’. This Committee proved quite unequal to the situation it faced—with growing economic depression, tax strikes, declining public order, and the threat of army mutiny in the North—and it dispersed on 17 December. Monck now made his decisive intervention. Marching south, he brushed Lambert’s forces aside, while three regiments in London followed Monck’s example and reinstated the Rump. After his arrival in London in early February, Monck secured the return of the Long Parliament: this organized fresh elections and then dissolved itself. These elections produced a strongly pro-royalist Convention which agreed to recognize Charles II as already king since 30 January 1649. So it was that a final army coup brought about the restoration of the monarchy. This irony was not lost on contemporaries. When

200   English Politics in the 1650s Charles II entered London on 29 May, the royalist diarist John Evelyn ‘stood in the Strand, and beheld it, and blessed God: And all this without one drop of blood, and by that very army, which rebelled against him’.80

Conclusion No more than any other historical developments were these events inevitable. Had Oliver Cromwell lived longer, or accepted the kingship, or had Richard been given longer to develop his own bases of support in different ways from his father, it is not impossible that the Protectorate might have survived for longer. But both Lord Protectors had to contend with the fundamental divide between army leaders and civilian politicians that dogged the republic from its very creation. Oliver handled this by performing a very adroit balancing act between the two interests. Further light on the political skills that enabled him to do this is likely to be shed by the forthcoming publication, probably in 2016, of a new critical edition of his writings and speeches, under the general editorship of John Morrill. Oliver naturally remains the dominant figure in any account of English politics in the 1650s, for he proved to be unique in his capacity to hold the disparate elements of the regime together for any length of time. That task was not impossible, but it was extremely challenging, and in the end this was a challenge that defeated Richard. In a way, the officer/civilian divide reflected a duality within Oliver’s own complex character. He epitomized in his own person the conflicting values of the gentry and the army officers, and to that extent he embodied the dilemmas that lay at the heart of the English revolution. The 1650s were not an inevitable trek back towards monarchy, but the Restoration did grow out of a fault-line that had existed since 1649 and that stemmed from the very creation of the republic. In that sense, the dilemmas of the revolution—as Cromwell knew perhaps better than anybody—were ultimately insoluble.

Notes 1. Chapter 9, above. 2. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London, 1961), 135. 3. S. R. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (3rd edition, Oxford, 1906), 381–91. 4. Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974), chap. 1. 5. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, 3 vols. (London, 1911), II, 559–62. 6. Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances, II, 387–9, 409–12, 423–5; Worden, Rump Parliament, chap. 7. 7. Worden, Rump Parliament, chap. 6; Mary Cotterell, ‘Interregnum Law Reform: The Hale Commission of 1652’, English Historical Review, 83 (1968): 689–704. 8. Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances, III, lxvi–lxxi, lxxxii–lxxxiv, xc–xci.

david l. Smith   201 9. Worden, Rump Parliament, 92. 10. John Morrill, Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000), 54. 11. S. C. Lomas (ed.), The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, with elucidations by Thomas Carlyle, 3 vols. (London, 1904) [hereafter cited as Carlyle-Lomas], II, 226. 12. Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982), 41. 13. Worden, Rump Parliament, chaps. 14–16. 14. Carlyle-Lomas, II, 264–5. 15. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 400–4. 16. Worden, Rump Parliament, chaps. 15–17; Carlyle-Lomas, II, 284. 17. Carlyle-Lomas, II, 284, 288. 18. Cf. J. C. Davis’s discussion of the options facing Cromwell, in chap. 13, below. 19. For the composition of Barebone’s Parliament, see chap. 14, below. 20. Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), chap. 17; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 144–53. 21. Carlyle-Lomas, II, 290, 296. 22. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, chaps. 6–7. 23. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, chaps. 8–10. 24. Carlyle-Lomas, III, 98. 25. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 306–10. 26. David Farr, John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major-General, 1619–1684 (Woodbridge, 2003), 124–129; Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 405–17. 27. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 316–26, 359–71. 28. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, chap. 9. 29. Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1991), 104. 30. Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), chaps. 12–13. 31. Don M. Wolfe (ed.), Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume 5: 1650–1655, Part 1 (New Haven, 1966), 673; Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, 2007), chap. 12. 32. Smith, chap. 14, below. 33. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 414, 416. 34. See chap. 14, below. 35. Peter Gaunt, ‘ “To create a little world out of chaos”: The Protectoral Ordinances of 1653–1654 Reconsidered’, in Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007), 105–26; Ivan Roots, ‘Cromwell’s Ordinances: The Early Legislation of the Protectorate’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (London, 1972), 143–64. 36. Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances, II, 855–8, 871–5, 917–18, 949–67, 968–90. 37. Carlyle-Lomas, II, 339, 358. 38. Patrick Little and David L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, 2007), 84–6. 39. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 427–47. 40. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, chap. 2. 41. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 200–1; Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 443. 42. Peter Gaunt, ‘Law-making in the First Protectorate Parliament’, in Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt, and Stephen Roberts (eds.), Politics and People in Revolutionary England (Oxford, 1986), 163–86.

202   English Politics in the 1650s Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 406. Carlyle-Lomas, II, 409, 416–17, 430. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 620–2, 630–4. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (2nd edition, Cambridge, 1986), 322–324; Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001). 47. Carlyle-Lomas, II, 531, 543. 48. Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, 228. 49. Henry Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2013), chaps. 7–8; John Sutton, ‘Cromwell’s Commissioners for Preserving the Peace of the Commonwealth: A Staffordshire Case Study’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998), 151–82. 50. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 59–71; Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, chap. 9. 51. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 87–93, 302–5. 52. Carlyle-Lomas, II, 511, 549. 53. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 138, 183–6, 211–14. 54. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 109–10, 115–16, 252–4; Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals, chap. 10; Christopher Durston, ‘The Fall of Cromwell’s Major-Generals’, English Historical Review, 113 (1998): 18–37. 55. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 12–48, 306–12. 56. Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), chap. 5. 57. Patrick Little, ‘John Thurloe and the Offer of the Crown to Oliver Cromwell’, in Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell, 216–40. 58. Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘Hereditary Succession and the Cromwellian Protectorate: The Offer of the Crown Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013): 1095–128. 59. Farr, John Lambert, 143–7; Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 110–11. 60. Benjamin Woodford, Perceptions of a Monarchy without a King: Reactions to Oliver Cromwell’s Power (Montreal and Kingston, 2013), chap. 1. 61. Carlyle-Lomas, III, 70–1. 62. Carlyle-Lomas, III, 127–9. 63. Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), chap. 1. 64. For an analysis of the Humble Petition and Advice, see chap. 14, below; the text is printed in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 447–59. 65. Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Council’, in Little (ed.), Cromwellian Protectorate, 82–104. 66. Mercurius Publicus, 369 (25 June–2 July 1657): 7881–4 (British Library [BL], Thomason E 505/1). 67. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 97–8, 111–12, 120, 139–40; see also ­chapter 14, below. 68. Carlyle-Lomas, III, 173–5. 69. Carlyle-Lomas, III, 187–92; Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 97–8, 139–40, 189–91. 70. Mercurius Politicus, 438 (14–21 October 1658): 927–8 (BL, Thomason E 760/6). 71. Mercurius Politicus, 443 (18–25 November 1658): 30 (BL, Thomason E 760/16); Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge, 2000), 133–6. 72. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 145–6. 43. 44. 45. 46.

david l. Smith   203 73. Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘ “Not in any doubtfull dispute”? Reassessing the nomination of Richard Cromwell’, Historical Research, 83 (2010): 281–300. 74. Jason Peacey, ‘ “Fit for Public Services”: The Upbringing of Richard Cromwell’, in Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell, 241–64; Jason Peacey, ‘The Protector Humbled: Richard Cromwell and the Constitution’, in Little (ed.), Cromwellian Protectorate, 32–52; Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, chap. 7. 75. See chap. 14, below. 76. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 72–9. 77. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 112, 120–2, 153–70. 78. Chap. 12, below. 79. Reece, Army in Cromwellian England, chaps. 9–10; Scott, Commonwealth Principles, chap. 14; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, chap. 26; Farr, John Lambert, chap. 10. 80. John Bowle (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford, 1985), 182.

Further Reading Coward, Barry, The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester, 2002). Davis, J. C., Oliver Cromwell (London, 2001). Durston, Christopher, Cromwell’s Major-Generals:  Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001). Holmes, Clive, Why was Charles I Executed? (London, 2006). Kenyon, J. P., The Stuart Constitution:  Documents and Commentary (2nd edition, Cambridge, 1986). Little, Patrick (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007). Little, Patrick (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009). Little, Patrick and David L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, 2007). Morrill, John, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2007). Smith, David L. (ed.), Cromwell and the Interregnum: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 2003). Smith, David L., The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689 (London, 1999). Woolrych, Austin, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002). Woolrych, Austin, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982). Worden, Blair, The English Civil Wars, 1640–1660 (London, 2009). Worden, Blair, God’s Instruments:  Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012). Worden, Blair, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974).

Chapter 12

The Restor at i on i n Britain and I re l a nd Tim Harris

‘We cannot but with all humility and thankfulness admire and adore the infinite mercy and immediate goodness of Almighty God, when wee seriously consider how beyond all humane expectations and endeavours he has by the gratious interposition only of his owne power, and wisdom, thus miraculously, and without effusion of blood restored your most excellent Majesty in honor and safety to your Thrones and people.’ So wrote the ‘most humble and most dutifull Subjects’ of Dorset in their address to Charles II congratulating him on his restoration to the thrones of his three kingdoms in May 1660.1 Charles’s restoration did indeed seem miraculous. After years of failed attempts to restore the Stuart monarchy by force2—even as late as August 1659 a conspiracy led by General George Booth in Cheshire had been easily put down—Charles was eventually to reclaim his inheritance without a drop of blood being shed: he was simply invited to return to his kingdoms by the English Convention parliament which opened on 25 April. As the loyal address from the ministers of Devon and Exeter put it, ‘that which the lord denyed to your sword he hath given you without the expence of treasure or blood’.3 The decision to recall Charles II was greeted with widespread rejoicing throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. The Convention’s resolution on 1 May 1660 that ‘the Government . . . ought to be, by King, Lords and Commons’ prompted bonfire celebrations across the whole kingdom, while there were similar displays when Charles was publicly proclaimed king in London on 8 May and in the provinces a week later. When Charles was proclaimed in Boston, Lincolnshire, the ‘yonge men’ of the town took down the republic’s coat of arms and ‘pissed and sh[itted] on them’ before committing them to a bonfire they had made ‘for joy’ at the recalling of the king.4 Charles’s eventual return to the capital on 29 May, his thirtieth birthday, prompted ‘three days and three nights’ of rejoicing, as conduits ran with wine and huge crowds toasted the restored monarch and burned effigies of Oliver Cromwell ‘and other rebels’.5 Nor was it just England that rejoiced. When Charles was proclaimed in Dublin, ‘the streets ran with Wine’, there were fireworks and ‘almost a Bonfire at every house’, and an elaborate mock funeral of the Rump

tim Harris   205 parliament. In Edinburgh magistrates and citizens celebrated ‘this great deliverance’ with bells, fireworks, and bonfires, while on 19 June, the official day of thanksgiving in Scotland for the king’s restoration, an effigy of Oliver Cromwell, with the Devil pursuing him, was ‘blown up’ on Castle Hill.6 The hope was that the return of monarchy would restore unity and stability. In his Declaration issued from Breda in the Low Countries on 4 April, Charles had represented himself as the only person who could heal the bleeding wounds in church and state, promising ‘a free and general Pardon’ to all supporters of the republic (save those who might subsequently be excepted by parliament) and ‘a Liberty to tender Consciences’.7 The editor of a collection of songs and ballads composed to celebrate the demise of the republic rejoiced in June 1660 that ‘we have lived to that day, that there is no Cavalier, because there is nothing else’.8 One song celebrating George Monck, the man who had engineered the Restoration by forcing the dissolution of the republican Rump parliament in February 1660, stressed how all the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland had cause to rejoice: ‘Then of[f]‌with your Pots, English, Irish and Scots, / And loyal Cambro-Brittains’, opened the chorus, while a final verse urged ‘Now Jockey, Teag, and Shenkin, / Pray no more to St. Andrew / To Patrick or Davie, / But St. George, who, to sav’ee, / ’Gainst Dragon Rump like a man drew’.9 Yet unity did not materialize. The longed-for stability proved elusive. England, Scotland, and Ireland were to see further plots and conspiracies against the state under both Charles II and his successor James VII and II, and in the end all three kingdoms were to succumb once more to revolution in 1688–9. How, then, to understand the Restoration? How was it brought about—and what were those who helped bring it about hoping to achieve? What was the nature of the Restoration settlement, and why, ultimately, did it fail to heal the three kingdoms’ wounds?

The Road to Restoration As with the crisis that developed in the late 1630s and triggered the descent into civil war, the restoration of the monarchy needs to be set in a Britannic context. This is not simply because Charles II would end up being restored to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland. It was because the Cromwellian Protectorate had forged a British state, giving the Scots and Irish representation in the Protectorate parliaments, and the unravelling of this state could not be otherwise than a British affair. The fall of the Protectorate in the spring of 1659 and the resumption of political power by the Rump of the Long Parliament that had been forcibly dissolved in 1653 had the effect of voiding the legislation that had forged the Cromwellian union. In Ireland, a power struggle developed between different factions of the army, and as the radicals under Edmund Ludlow gained the ascendancy, Protestant landowners began to fear for the security of their newly acquired estates. When the army in England under Major-General Lambert seized power from the Rump in October 1659, the more conservative army leaders in Ireland decided to take action.

206   The Restoration in Britain and Ireland In December a group of officers led by Sir Theophilus Jones and backed by gentry of Old Protestant stock seized Dublin Castle, while Sir Charles Coote and Lord Broghill, two ex-royalists turned Cromwellian collaborators, secured various garrisons in Connacht and Munster. Now in possession of the key military strongholds in the kingdom, the instigators of this coup called for an Irish Convention, elected by the pre-war constituencies, to meet in Dublin in February—an assembly which under the skilful management of Broghill and Coote would go on to call for the restoration of monarchy.10 As the 2nd earl of Clarendon was later to recall, it was the English in Ireland who ‘made the Earliest advances towards his Majesties Restoration’.11 In England, following the army’s expulsion of the Rump, Anthony Ashley Cooper (the future 1st earl of Shaftesbury) and other former members of the Cromwellian council approached General George Monck, the commander of the army in Scotland, about the possibility of his marching into England to secure ‘the restoration of the Parliament’. Although the Rump was restored to share power with the army on 26 December, this proved too little too late; Monck marched south on 1 January, thereby setting in motion the train of events that was to lead to restoration. On 11 February Monck forced the Rump to readmit the secluded members, paving the way for the Rump to vote its own dissolution a week later and to call elections for the meeting of a free parliament. According to Ashley Cooper, Monck would never have done what he did without knowing that he had the support of Coote and the army in Ireland.12 It is not quite that prior revolts in Ireland and Scotland—external and contingent events—triggered the collapse of the regime in England. Here we have a Britannic conspiracy by agents of the British state, involving a certain degree of coordination between the key actors in Ireland, Scotland, and England, all of whom were either English (Ashley Cooper, Monck) or of Protestant Anglo-Irish stock (Broghill, Coote, and Jones). Moreover, as in 1638–41, the only reason why developments in Ireland and Scotland could have the effect they did on England in 1659–60 was because the regime in England was already beginning to collapse from within. By late 1659 the war with Spain, begun by Cromwell in 1655, had caused a severe economic downtown: trade was disrupted, bullion was in short supply, and there was a rise in unemployment. The war could only be sustained by high taxation, which an already heavily taxed population could ill afford, while grain prices also rose dramatically in the late 1650s. With people having less money to spend on consumables, urban shopkeepers were doing badly. London was particularly badly hit, with its population of merchants, shopkeepers, and apprentices. And these economic woes came at a time when there was a revival of sectarian radicalism in the army following the fall of the Protectorate, a cause of alarm not only to Anglican royalists but also to many old-style puritans (presbyterians, congregationalists) who had championed the parliamentarian cause in the 1640s. When the army expelled the Rump, Londoners responded by threatening a tax strike and petitioning the City authorities for an end to army rule. There were violent clashes with troops on 5 December as apprentices went to deliver a petition to the Lord Mayor calling either for the return of the secluded members (a full parliament) or free elections for a new parliament: the soldiers opened fire, killing half a dozen, which caused a public outcry.13 It was

tim Harris   207 this seeming drift into anarchy in the nation’s capital which prompted Monck to march south to restore order, while the people of England were now firmly convinced that the only solution to their woes would be a full or free parliament. Those who campaigned against army rule did not call explicitly for a return of monarchy. What they wanted was a restoration of parliamentary government and the rule of law; they embraced the language of popular liberties and the people’s birth-rights, not of Stuart legitimism. The apprentice petition of 5 December claimed ‘the freedome and priviledges of our Parliaments’ as ‘our undoubted birth right’, ‘the great Charter of the people of England’, and ‘the most probable means’ to ‘establish the true Protestant Religion, reform the Lawes, secure our Liberties’ and to restore ‘Trading’.14 Similarly, The Free-Mens Petition of late 1659 argued that the only way to heal ‘these distracted and divided Nations and City’ was through the summoning of ‘a free English Parliament’, ‘according to the Laws of this Nation’ and the Triennial Act of 1641.15 A petition from the ‘Well-Affected Householders and Freemen’ of London of 8 February 1660 claimed that without ‘A Free Parliament’ the ‘undoubted Birthright of the English Nation’ and ‘all Liberties, both Religious and Civil’ could ‘never be preserved’, since legitimate authority could only be derived from ‘the rightfull Representatives of the people, by whom every individual doth consent’; the petitioners wanted ‘lawfull Government and Protection, According to Magna Charta and the Petition of Right’.16 Similar sentiments were reflected in addresses sent to Monck from the provinces. The gentry of Lincolnshire in February identified their grievances as being ‘The Violent Alterations of Government; the Heavy Impositions of Unheard-of Taxes’, which had ‘Ruined our Trade, and Impoverished the whole Nation’, and ‘the many Violations and Breaches made upon our Known Established Laws, and Fundamental Liberties’. ‘The onely Remedy’ was ‘a Free Full Parliament . . . wherein the Votes of all the Free People of this Nation may be included’, since only such could ‘have a Legal Capacity to Enact Laws and Statutes, that may equally bind all the Free People of England’.17 The nobility and gentry of York insisted that without either a full or free parliament, they could not be ‘obliged to pay . . . Taxes’, since they did not enjoy ‘the Fundamentall Rights of this Nation to consent to [their] own Laws by equall Representatives’.18 Was the demand for a full or free parliament nevertheless an implicit call for the restoration of monarchy? After all, the original Long Parliament had had to be dramatically purged in the first place before it proceeded to try Charles I and set up a republic, and the free parliament that was to be elected in the spring of 1660 did go on to restore Charles II. It would have been risky, in the latter months of 1659, to have called explicitly for the return of monarchy, since this would have been treason—although it should be pointed out that calling for a full and free parliament at this time was also treason and petitioning for such a parliament could be a life-threatening activity. Undoubtedly there was a certain amount of tactical positioning, as those who petitioned against the army and the Rump chose to express themselves in ways which they deemed likely to be most effective. The London apprentices, in reply to the charge by the army that they were threatening the peace of the Commonwealth, insisted that they were not asking for anything which the army itself had not ‘all along, even to this very day, declared to assert,

208   The Restoration in Britain and Ireland procure, and maintain’, namely ‘our Birth-right . . . as due unto us by the Laws’.19 Roger L’Estrange, the future government licenser of the press and crown propagandist under Charles II, published a number of anonymous pieces in 1659–60, many in the form of remonstrances and engagements purporting to have some degree of public endorsement, which he subsequently claimed testified to his royalist credentials on the eve of the Restoration; yet revealingly L’Estrange restricted himself to calling for a full parliament and in one piece even explicitly stated that a return to monarchy was ‘not . . . the thing we contend for’.20 Support for Monck was not necessarily closet support for Charles II. Monck did not march south with the intent of restoring monarchy, and for several weeks it seemed unclear what course of action he might take. The uncertainty over which way Monck might turn meant that those who wanted Monck to get rid of the Rump had strong reasons for not wishing to appear overtly royalist, although it is clear that by early 1660 a solution to the crisis which would involve Charles II being restored to his thrones was a perceived possibility. Thus a published letter from a ‘citizen’ of London to Monck of 3 February 1660—possibly one of L’Estrange’s ‘impersonations’, although not included by L’Estrange in his later published anthology of such works—stated that he was ‘neither for a Commonwealth, nor Kingship, neither for Charles Stuart, nor for your self [Monck]’, but for whatever could secure ‘the Good, Safety, Peace, and Tranquility of the whole Nation’. ‘The Poor want bread, the rich live not secure . . . the generality . . . have spent their Blood and Treasure to beggar themselves, and enrich a few’, and only ‘A Free Parliament’, ‘the Nation’s undoubted Right’, this writer believed, could retrieve ‘our Liberties from the Grave’ and redeem ‘a poor Nation from Bondage’.21 Monck was bowing to public pressure when he forced the Rump to readmit the secluded members on 11 February and then subsequently to vote its own dissolution, initiatives that were celebrated with the roasting of rumps of ‘oxen, poultry or other animals’ around huge bonfires. Only now did it become safe openly to voice support for Charles Stuart: according to the Venetian resident in England, ‘the citizens and soldiers spent the whole night drinking together and shouting about the streets’ not only ‘for a free parliament’ but also ‘for King Charles, whose name came openly from all lips without any fear’.22 Poems and songs composed at this time condemning the Rump were often explicitly pro-Charles II. ‘The Devil’s Arse a Peake’, for example, chastised ‘Foolish Britannicks’ for having ‘Cutt off your own Head’ and urged ‘Vive le Roy let’s merrily Sing / Can any Man well in his Wits, / Think worser of Charles our Noble good King, / Than those who do Govern by Fits?’23 Yet instead of being the authentic voice of popular culture, most of these songs were Cavalier propaganda, journalistic creations that probably were never sung—an attempt to claim anti-Rump sentiment for the royalist cause, thereby hinting, perhaps, that there was doubt in Cavalier minds as to whether the mood of the people really was for the restoration of monarchy.24 Tellingly, even the most explicitly royalist anti-Rump balladry saw the need to appeal to popular grievances or to embrace the libertarian rhetoric of the anti-army and anti-Rump petitions. Thus songs lamented how ‘three Kingdoms’ had been ‘enslav’d and plunder’d’, the Rump had ruled ‘against

tim Harris   209 Customs and Laws’, and soldiers ‘wrack[ed] the poor out of dores’, and celebrated the dissolution of the Rump as the day ‘Old Magna Charta was confirm’d’.25 It is dangerous, then, to read history backwards and assume that because the outcome of the campaign against the army and the Rump was the restoration of monarchy, this must have been what the actors intended all along. Nevertheless, a movement which started out as being pro-parliament nevertheless came to be explicitly pro-Charles. As the monarchical solution came to appear increasingly inevitable, even those who had initially been less attracted to the idea came to support the return of Charles II. Yet among those who celebrated the downfall of the Rump, there were fundamental differences of opinion over the desired settlement that should ensue (even assuming that the vast majority did come to favour a restoration). Much of the anti-Rump balladry looked for the restoration of the old church of bishops and prayer book. One recalled how ‘It was that Parliament that took / Out of our Churches our Service book’; another rhymed ‘All sober Men know that ’tis a mischeivous Fate, / A Kingdome to turn into a popular State, / And Episcopacy into a Presbyterate’.26 The London petitions of late 1659, by contrast, while somewhat vague on the desired religious settlement, did not explicitly declare for bishops and prayer book. One of 15 November, for example, called for the restoration of the religion established by ‘our three last Princes, with some amendment in Discipline’.27 That of early December emphasized the importance of encouraging and countenancing a learned ministry and ‘the faithfull preaching and dispensing of Gods holy Word and Sacraments’.28 There was certainly a violent backlash against the sects in late 1659, early 1660, and even riotous attacks on Quakers and baptists.29 Yet mainstream English puritans, and English presbyterians and congregationalists, could be just as hostile to the sects as any Anglican. The Humble Petition and Address of the Sea-men and Watermen of London of late 1659, for example—which was drawn up by the famous anti-Laudian campaigner William Prynne—lamented ‘the Extraordinary decay of Merchandize, Trade, Religion, Justice, Piety, and all sorts of Oppressions, Miseries, Rapines, Wars, Tumults, Sects, Heresies, Blasphemies, Alterations of Government, and destructive Confusions’.30 Not all welcomed the Restoration. There are abundant examples of people who got into trouble for speaking out against the return of monarchy, some going so far as to wish Charles dead and even threatening to kill him themselves. What has come down to us is doubtless just the tip of the iceberg. The survival of provincial quarter sessions records is patchy, and there are very few sessions records for the City of London prior to 1666 due to the Great Fire. Not everyone who spoke out against the restoration of monarchy ended up in court, raising the question of the relationship between reported and unreported crime, while of course it was not a criminal offence to speak out against the monarchy until the monarchy had actually been restored. Yet the fact that such speech would not have left a trace in the historical record unless it had been prosecuted also tells us something. Often the only reason why we know of cases of alleged seditious speech is because those who heard the words spoken reported them to the authorities, opening the intriguing possibility that the examples of anti-monarchical sentiment at the time of the Restoration that have left a trace in the historical record also tell us something about popular monarchism.

210   The Restoration in Britain and Ireland The only reason why we know that Thomas Blacklocke, speaking in a Southwark pub on May Day 1660, thought that ‘if ever the Kinge come into England . . . he shold be hanged at the said Blacklocke’s Dore’ and that ‘he wold helpe to hange him there himselfe’ is because a sawyer, a watermen, two watermen’s wives, and the wife of an oarmaker came forward to testify against him.31 What this type of evidence clearly does tell us is that this was a society with scores to settle, where bitter rivalries and resentments remained. In May 1660 two Kentishmen came forward to give information against George Keddell of Rolvenden, Kent, a former JP, alleging that he had been active in soliciting ‘hands for the Tryall of the late King Charles’ back in early 1649, had ‘very much oppressed the Country where he Lives both poore and rich’, and had said shortly before the proclamation of Charles II ‘That hee had as leave see his owne heart Blood on the earth and his Neighbors dead at their doores As to heare a King proclaymed’.32 In July 1660 Lincolnshire gentleman William Shepley came forward to denounce a local minister for trying to extinguish bonfires made to celebrate the proclaiming of Charles II and a local yeoman for having said back in 1650 ‘That it was the blessedst day that ever came to England when the Kinge was beheaded, and that hee hoped none of the whore’s [i.e. Henrietta Maria’s] posterity should ever reigne’.33 Such was the climate of recrimination at this time that on 30 May Charles II found it necessary to issue a proclamation against ‘Debauch’d and Prophane Persons’, who, on pretence of affection for the king, spent their time in taverns drinking the king’s health ‘and Inveighing against all others . . . not of their own dissolute temper’.34 It was the sects who were most opposed to the restoration of monarchy. Shortly after Charles was proclaimed in London, the Venetian resident observed how ‘Among the sectaries, i.e. the Anabaptists, Quakers and others . . . many are disconsolate and some are abusive so that arrests take place daily.’35 Some remained die-hard republicans and were to engage in conspiracies against the government in the early 1660s.36 Most of the separatists, however, well aware of which way the tide was turning, hastened to make their peace with the Restoration, putting their faith in the promise Charles II had made from Breda that he would guarantee liberty for tender consciences.37

The Restoration Settlement in England Ultimately, then, the vast majority of people in England came to acquiesce in the restoration of monarchy, most enthusiastically welcomed it, and large numbers were actively involved in helping to bring it about. Nevertheless, people expected different things from the restored monarch. Constitutionally, the Restoration put the clock back to 1641, keeping on the books the reforming legislation of the early months of the Long Parliament which had abolished the prerogative courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, feudal dues such as wardship and knighthood fines, and extra-parliamentary levies such as ship money, and had tied the crown to meeting parliament at last every three years. Yet it would be

tim Harris   211 wrong to infer that there was a consensus over returning to the position of 1641. A group of presbyterian peers and MPs known as ‘the Knot’ pressed for a conditional restoration, along the lines of the proposed Newport Treaty of 1648, which would have given parliament control over the militia and the right of appointment to all major offices of state. Others favoured a return to the monarchy of the Personal Rule. In 1660 the decision was taken that any legislation enacted that had received the royal assent, freely given, should remain on the statute books, while any that had not should be declared null and void. Since in a monarchy legislation required the royal assent, any conditions imposed on Charles II prior to his return would be vulnerable to being deemed legally invalid; on the same logic, restoring to the monarchy powers that had been legislated against in 1641 would in turn require fresh legislation. The full working out of the settlement in church and state would have to await the meeting of a parliament called by the king—and this was to be the Cavalier parliament that met in May 1661—since the Convention itself was an irregular assembly summoned before there was a king. For this reason, it was inevitable the Restoration would be a process. Some ultra-royalists did campaign for the restoration of Star Chamber in the early 1660s, though without success. However, the Triennial Act was modified in 1664, removing the enforcement mechanism that allowed election writs to be sent out in the king’s name if the king failed to call a parliament within three years (hence how Charles II was able to get by without calling a parliament in England between March 1681 and his death in February 1685). Lest there was any doubt over who controlled the power of the sword, two Militia Acts of 1661 and 1662 affirmed the sole control of the militia to be in the crown, in rejection of parliament’s Militia Ordinance of March 1642. This was therefore a monarchy that retained considerable power. The king had the sole right to choose his own ministers, he determined all questions of policy, both foreign and domestic, and he could veto legislation. The major constraint was financial. Although in compensation for the loss of feudal dues Charles received the excise tax and a new tax on fireplaces set up on 1662, the revenues of the monarchy initially fell far short of those needed to meet the expenses of government, making the crown heavily dependent upon grants of parliamentary taxation.38 It was not until the 1680s, that the more efficient collection of the excise and hearth tax and an increase in revenue from customs dues, thanks to an expansion of trade, afforded the crown the possibility of being financially independent of parliament. Yet there was room for debate as to what type of monarchy had been restored. There could be no escaping the fact that the English had restored their parliament before they had restored their king and that Charles had been called back by an elected representative assembly. Contemporaries—even those who were eager to prove their loyalty to the new regime by denouncing those they suspected of harbouring republican sympathies—spoke of Charles II having been ‘voted Kinge’.39 The official line, however, was that Charles had been restored as a result of divine agency. In his speech to the king and members of the Convention at the Banqueting House on 29 May 1660, the speaker of the Commons Sir Harbottle Grimston (himself one of the presbyterian Knot) noted that ‘the restitution’ of the king to his ‘most indubitable Native Right of

212   The Restoration in Britain and Ireland Soveraignty’ had been ‘brought to pass by a miraculous way of Divine Providence’; ‘’Tis God and God alone’, Grimston insisted, ‘to whom be that Glory’.40 A providentialist view of the Restoration opened the door for the revival of divine-right theory, the view that kings were ‘God’s Vice-gerents’ and ‘accountable to none but God’.41 Yet Anglicans and Cavaliers concurred that above all else the restoration of monarchy marked a return of ‘our Laws, Liberties, Properties’.42 In his coronation sermon of 23 April 1661 the bishop of Worcester George Morley insisted that the English monarchy was ‘Political’, ‘not Despotical’, that the king did not govern his subjects ‘arbitrarily’ but ‘by Equal and Just Lawes, made with their own consent to them’.43 The 1st earl of Clarendon, speaking in the Lords on 10 May 1661, rejoiced that ‘we have our King again, and our Laws again, and Parliaments again’.44 The most divisive aspect of the Restoration settlement concerned the church, with the sects hoping for liberty of conscience, the presbyterians and old puritans for the return of the old pre-war church ‘with some amendment in discipline’, and the Anglicans for the return of bishops and prayer book. Charles II was probably sincere in professing that he wanted liberty of conscience. However, the Anglican-Cavalier gentry who dominated the parliament elected in 1661 re-established an intolerant episcopalian church. Not only was there no toleration for the sects, there were no concessions with regard to the liturgy that might have enabled presbyterians to be comprehended within a broader national church. Under the terms of the Act of Uniformity of 1662 all ministers and teachers had to testify their ‘unfeigned assent and consent’ to everything in the Book of Common Prayer by 24 August (St Bartholomew’s Day) or face deprivation. Nearly 1,000 clergymen (about 10% of the ministry) found themselves unable to comply, and were forced to give up their livings as a result.45 A fierce penal code was established in an attempt to keep nonconformists out of town government and away from major urban centres—the Corporation Act (1661), the Five Mile Act (1665)—and to criminalize nonconformist worship—the Quaker Act (1662), the Conventicle Acts (1664, 1670). There was considerable support for the revival of episcopacy in England, not just among the landed elite but also among more humble parish Anglicans; even the presbyterians came to acknowledge the inevitability that bishops would be restored and hoped instead for limited episcopacy (though to no avail). Measures against the sects also had widespread support. But the legislation against mainstream puritans and presbyterians proved much more controversial, and achieved only narrow majorities in the Cavalier parliament.46 Those who found themselves unable to conform to the established church risked heavy fines, distraint of goods, periods of imprisonment, transportation (under the 1664 Conventicle Act), even death (since large numbers were to die in jail). England became a persecuting society, although persecution tended to come in waves, depending on the threat to state security that various nonconformist groups were perceived to pose at any given time. Yet intolerance was not justified on religious grounds, as punishment for adhering to a false religion. The rationale was political. Nonconformist ministers were thought to preach resistance to divinely ordained monarchs; conventicles were feared as places where people plotted against the state.47 The campaign against Protestant dissent,

tim Harris   213 to its supporters, therefore, was no persecution, since one could only suffer persecution for doing something which God commanded; the nonconformists were being ‘justly prosecuted’ for disobeying the law.48 The church that was re-established after 1660 was not that of 1641, which by then was a church of bishops and prayer book purged of its Laudian excesses. Although the religious fault-line that emerged as England descended into civil war in 1641–2 is normally seen as being between puritans and non-Laudian Anglicans (with everyone eager to distance themselves from Archbishop Laud’s reform agenda of the 1630s), the Restoration church was to contain distinctly Laudian elements. There was not a complete Laudian revival. Charles’s desire for an inclusive church led him to appoint a new bench of bishops in 1660–1 that reflected a broad range of churchmanship: the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield went to the critic of Laudianism John Hacket, that of Lincoln to the conformist Calvinist Robert Sanderson, and that of Norwich to the former presbyterian Edward Reynolds. Charles even tried to persuade the famous puritan divine Richard Baxter to accept a bishopric, though Baxter declined. Yet not only were Laudians also elevated to bishoprics, they came to dominate the key positions in the church: William Juxon was elevated to Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon to London and subsequently to Canterbury, Brian Duppa to Winchester, John Cosin to Durham. Sheldon’s successor as archbishop was William Sancroft, one of a younger generation of Restoration divines who identified with a nexus of ideas that had come to influence churchmanship in the 1630s under Laud: an attachment to Arminian views on grace, strict adherence to the formularies and canons of the church, the creation of a richly ceremonial setting for divine worship, and marked hostility to puritan nonconformity. Charles was a Laudian in his devotions, and at his restoration had the chapel royal at Whitehall refitted with organs, tapestries, and a railed-in altar. The cathedrals and many college chapels followed suit in embracing Laudian-style ceremonialism and furnishings. Railed-in altars also began to be restored in local churches, with some communities even calling for those responsible for despoiling the local church ‘in the late unhappy times’ to be named and held accountable, although this proved a more contentious issue, and initially only a handful of parishes were prepared to back the change. The rebuilding of the London churches by Christopher Wren following the Great Fire, however, popularized railed-in altars, and by the end of the century they were both widespread and widely accepted.49 Yet although the presbyterians and separatists lost out, it would be wrong to see the Restoration as a clear-cut victory for the Cavalier-Anglicans. Many Cavaliers were alarmed at the moderation shown to those who had been associated with the republican regimes. The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion of August 1660, for instance, exempted a mere thirty-three individuals from the pardon, of whom only a third were executed. Particularly galling was to see many parliamentarians and former Cromwellians receive honours and office under the restored monarchy. Moreover, although many Cavaliers were able to regain lands that had been confiscated during the 1640s and 1650s (much to the resentment of their Cromwellian purchasers), nothing was done to help those who had ‘voluntarily’ sold their land to help the royalist cause. Disappointed

214   The Restoration in Britain and Ireland Cavaliers came to complain that the king had passed ‘an act of oblivion for his friends and of indemnity for his enemies’.50

The Restoration Settlements in Scotland and Ireland The Restoration gave Scotland and Ireland back their political independence and restored Charles as king of three separate kingdoms. Yet the respective settlements were asymmetrical. In Scotland parliament passed a sweeping Rescissory Act in March 1661, rescinding all legislation enacted from 1640, thereby putting the constitutional clock back to 1633. The logic, as with England, was that any legislation that had not received the royal assent was null and void. In contrast to the English, however, the Scots had rebelled prior to the enactment of any reforming legislation. In Scotland, therefore, the monarchy was restored to the height of its powers during the personal rule, the legislation of the Covenanter revolution undone, and presbyterianism disestablished. Very few in Scotland had supported the regicide. The Scots had declared Charles II king immediately following the execution of his father, and they had crowned him king at Scone in January 1651. Their ideal had been a Covenanted king and they had made Charles II sign the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 before crowning him. However, Charles II disliked presbyterianism and resented the way he had been treated by the Scots in 1651. Years of presbyterian rule had also generated an anticlerical reaction among the traditional ruling classes in Scotland, who were eager to diminish the influence of the clerical estate and to do what they could to please their restored monarch in the hope of reviving their own political and economic fortunes. In March 1661 the Scottish parliament approved legislation giving the king the right to settle a frame of church government that was ‘most agreeable to the word of God, most suteable to monarchicall Government, and most complying with the publict peace and quyet of the kingdome’, and in mid-August Charles II simply announced that he had decided to restore ‘government by bishops, as it was by law before the late troubles’. A legislative package formally re-establishing episcopacy was enacted during the parliamentary session of 1662, and this was followed by the enactment of a fierce penal code against presbyterian dissent. Approximately one-third of the established ministry of about 952 were driven out of the church, with the south-western shires being the worst hit: in the synod of Galloway alone, thirty-four ministers were deprived in a total of just thirty-seven parishes. There was also no generalized indemnity in Scotland; when a Scottish Act of Indemnity was eventually passed in September 1662, some 700 were excluded from its provisions.51 In Ireland, the constitutional and ecclesiastical situation that had existed prior to the outbreak of the civil war was in essence restored. The crucial difference in Ireland, however, was the vital role played in bringing about the Restoration by those who had

tim Harris   215 benefited from the Cromwellian regime. These proved willing to make compromises on the political and religious front, so long as they could keep what they had come to Ireland for in the first place, namely land. Hence in Ireland the clock was certainly not put back to 1641.52 Those who sat in the Irish Convention of 1660 saw the need for a state church, although there was some disagreement over whether or not an episcopalian or presbyterian settlement was preferable. When the commissioners sent to London to treat with the king learned of Charles’s own preference for episcopacy, the Convention agreed that the church in Ireland should be ‘resettled in Doctrine, Discipline and Worship’ according to the laws in force in Ireland in Charles I’s time, though ‘with such Liberty to tender Consciences’ as Charles II had promised in his Declaration of Breda. Charles immediately began making appointments to the vacant bishoprics and by the beginning of 1661 episcopalianism had been fully restored. Yet there was to be no formal toleration. On 22 January 1661 the king issued a proclamation declaring all meetings by papists, presbyterians, independents, and separatists illegal, while in May the newly assembled Irish parliament issued a proclamation requiring ‘all persons whatsoever’ to obey the laws establishing the government of the church by bishops and to conform to the prayer book. For the time being, the legal basis of the restored church remained the old Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1560, together with the articles and canons of 1634. It was not until 1666 that the Irish parliament passed its own Act of Uniformity, based on the English Act of 1662. Yet although both Catholics and Protestant dissenters were to be excluded from full political and economic rights, in practice there was a considerable degree of de facto toleration. The most contentious issue proved to be the land settlement. Those—both Protestant and Catholic—who had lost their lands in the 1640s and 1650s for supporting Charles I expected to be recompensed for their loyalty. Yet although their lands had been given in the first place to those who had supported the war effort against Charles I, many of these had in turn sold them on in the 1650s, and the new purchasers wanted to protect what they believed they had legally acquired. In an attempt to appease these competing interests, Charles issued a declaration on 30 November 1660 promising that Catholics innocent of involvement in the Irish Rebellion of 1641 would be restored to their estates and that Protestant soldiers and adventurers should be compensated (‘reprised’) for any of the land they had to restore to innocents, and offering land to Protestants who had served in the royal forces in Ireland before June 1649. Charles’s declaration was given statutory force by the Act of Settlement of May 1662, which added further clauses in favour of particular individuals and groups. The problem was that there was simply not enough land in Ireland to satisfy all legitimate claimants, while Charles himself did not help matters by giving land taken from the regicides and Cromwellians to his brother the duke of York and courtiers like the duke of Ormonde. A court of claims set up to administer the Act’s provisions heard some 800 cases, issuing 566 decrees of innocence to Catholics, 141 to Protestants, and declaring 113 Catholics ‘nocent’, but several thousand claims remained unheard. Finally in 1665 the Act of Explanation determined that soldiers and adventurers should hand over one-third of their land to meet the requirements of restoration and

216   The Restoration in Britain and Ireland reprisal, confirmed existing decrees of innocence, but decided that no more claims would be heard, instead simply naming certain individuals who were to have full or partial restoration of their estates. Large numbers of Catholics were denied an opportunity even to have their day in court. The result was that whereas on the eve of the Irish Rebellion, Catholics had held some 66% of the land of Ireland in 1641—a figure which was reduced to less than 10% as a result of the Cromwellian confiscations—by the mid-1670s Catholics held a mere 29%. Moreover, land was concentrated in fewer hands. Thus whereas there had been 6756 Catholic landowners in 1641, there were only 1353 by the late 1660s. In short, the Restoration settlement left Catholics in possession of less than half the amount of land they had owned prior to the Irish Rebellion and reduced the number of Catholic landowners to a mere one-fifth of the pre-Rebellion total.53 One Old English author styled the Restoration land settlement ‘the greatest injustice’ ever seen, with ‘an innocent nation’ being ‘excluded from their birth-rights’. The Gaelic Irish poet David Ó Bruadair lamented how the settlement had left the Irish nobility ‘all cloakless and shirtless in poverty’. Protestants, on the other hand, thought they had given up too much of their land, insisting they had invested a lot of money improving the land they had obtained and that it was therefore worth more.

Conclusion Consensus was not restored after 1660 because the Restoration was not born of consensus. The longed-for stability proved elusive not because significant numbers of people never wanted the return of monarchy in the first place (though some did not), but rather because people expected different things from the restored monarch. In all three kingdoms, the Restoration ended up bequeathing a politics of resentment, as many of those who had initially rejoiced at Charles II’s return came to feel betrayed by the respective settlements worked out in the separate kingdoms. Yet it was not simply that there were various groups who obviously lost out: the Protestant nonconformists (in England and Ireland), the Scottish presbyterians, the vast majority of Irish Catholics. It is not clear who the winners were. Cavalier-Anglicans in England had cause to feel frustrated that their sufferings on behalf of the royalist cause had not been sufficiently recompensed. Protestants of the established church in Ireland resented having to give back as much land as they did and felt themselves a beleaguered minority (just 10% of the population) in a country where the crown was too soft on both Protestant and Catholic dissent. Even the episcopalian interest, in both England and Scotland, came to feel undermined by Charles II’s various attempts in the 1660s and 1670s to secure toleration by dint of the royal prerogative. The story of Restoration politics was to become one not only of the efforts by disappointed or disenfranchised groups, in all three kingdoms, to remedy their grievances (or, for the more extreme, to overthrow the regime that had betrayed them). It was one also of the struggles by the Cavaliers and Anglicans (and episcopalian interest north of the border) to keep the man who was supposed to be their king in

tim Harris   217 line. It was a struggle which they did not really come to win until the years of the Tory Reaction in the 1680s, in the aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis. The victory was to be short-lived, since their vision of Cavalier-Anglican kingship was to be betrayed once more by Charles II’s brother and successor, James II. It would prove to be the beginning of the end for the Stuart dynasty.

Notes 1. The National Archives [TNA], PRO SP 29/1, fos. 55, 56. I am grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding a period of extended leave at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, during which time I undertook the research and writing of this chapter. 2. David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660 (New Haven, 1960); Geoffrey Smith, Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies: Their Role in the British Civil Wars, 1640–1660 (Farnham, 2011). 3. TNA, PRO SP 29/1, fos. 54. 4. Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, ed. William L. Sachse, Camden Soc., third series, 91 (1961), 84. 5. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian [CSPVen], 1659–61, 155–6. 6. Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2005), 89, 105. 7. Journals of the House of Lords [LJ], XI, 7. 8. Alexander Brome (ed.), The Rump; Or, A Collection of Songs and Ballads made upon those who would be a Parliament (London, 1660), sig. A2. 9. The Cock-Crowing at the Approach of a Free-Parliament (London, 1660). 10. J. I. McGuire, ‘The Dublin Convention, the Protestant Community and the Emergence of an Ecclesiastical Settlement in 1660’, in Art Cosgrove and J. I. McGuire (eds.), Parliament and Community (Belfast, 1983), 121–46; Aidan Clarke, Prelude to Restoration in Ireland: The End of the Commonwealth, 1659–1660 (Cambridge, 1999); Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), 170–9. 11. British Library [BL], Add. MS 28,085, fo. 217. 12. W. D. Christie, A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury. 1621–1683, 2 vols. (1871), I, 210. 13. Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), 43–4. 14. To the Right Honourable . . . the Lord Mayor . . . The Most Humble Petition and Address of Divers Young Men, on the Behalf of Themselves and the Apprentices in and about this Honourable City (London, 1659). 15. The Free-Mens Petition: To the Right Honourable, The Lord Mayor [London, 1659]. 16. To the Right Honourable the Lord Maior . . . The Humble Petition of divers Well-affected Householders and Freemen of the said City [London, 1660]. 17. A Letter from Divers of the Gentry of the County of Lincolne: To His Excellency the Lord General Monck (London, 1659[/60]). 18. A Letter and Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry of the County of York, To His Excellency the Lord Generall Monck [London, 1660]. 19. A Vindication of the London Apprentices Petition and The Legality of their Subscriptions Asserted (London, 1659), 4. 20. L’Estrange His Apology (London, 1660), 60; Mark Knights, ‘Roger L’Estrange, Printed Petitions and the Problem of Intentionality’, in John Morrow and John Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter, 2008), 125.

218   The Restoration in Britain and Ireland 21. J. B., A Letter Presented to His Excellency General Monck, By A Citizen at His Coming to London, Feb. 3 1659 [London, 1660]; Knights, ‘Roger L’Estrange, Printed Petitions’, 125–6, note 50. 22. CSPVen, 1659–61, 119. 23. ‘The Devil’s Arse a Peake’, in Brome, ed., Rump, sigs. E6v, E7v. 24. Angela McShane, ‘Debate: The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England’, Past and Present [P&P], 196 (2007): 253–72, a corrective to Mark S. R. Jenner, ‘The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England’, P&P, 177 (2002): 84–120. 25. ‘The Rump’, ‘The City of London’s New Letany’, and ‘Sir Eglamor and the Dragon’, all in Brome, ed., Rump, 27, sigs. F7, M8v. 26. ‘A Christmas Song, When the Rump was First Dissolved’, in Brome (ed.), Rump, sig. D8; The Rump Serv’d in with a Grand Sallet (London, 1660). 27. The Remonstrance of the Apprentices in and about London (London, 1659). 28. To the Right Honourable . . . Lord Mayor . . . The Most Humble Petition and Address of Divers Young Men. 29. Barry Reay, ‘The Quakers, 1659, and the Restoration of the Monarchy’, History, 63 (1978): 193–213; Barry Reay, ‘Popular Hostility to the Quakers in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, Social History, 5 (1980): 387–407. 30. [William Prynne], To the Right Honourable, the Lord Mayor . . . The Humble Petition and Address of the Sea-men, and Waterman, in and about the said City of London [London, 1659]. 31. House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers, 28 May 1660. For further examples of seditious words against the restored monarchy, see David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010), chap. 9. 32. TNA, PRO SP 29/1, fo. 109. 33. TNA, PRO SP 29/7, fo. 27. 34. Charles II, A Proclamation against Vicious, Debauch’d, and Prophane Persons (London, 1660); Robert Steele, A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns, 3 vols. in 2 (New York, 1967), I, 3212. 35. CSPVen, 1659–61, 146. 36. Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1986). 37. Harris, London Crowds, 60. 38. Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989). 39. TNA, PRO SP 29/7, fo. 53. 40. The Speech of Sir Harbottle Grimston . . . 29 May 1660 (London, 1660), 3–5. 41. Francis Gregory, David’s Returne from His Punishment (Oxford, 1660), 12. 42. Gilbert Sheldon, David’s Deliverance and Thanksgiving (London, 1660), 32. 43. George Morley, A Sermon Preached at the Magnificent Coronation of . . . Charles the 2d (London, 1661), 36. 44. LJ, XI, 248. 45. David J.  Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day:  Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity (Manchester, 2007). 46. Seaward, Cavalier Parliament, 193. 47. John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006), chaps. 3, 5; George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion, and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010), chap. 2.

tim Harris   219 48. George Hickes, The True Notion of Persecution (London, 1681), 6; Mark Goldie, ‘The Huguenot Experience and the Problem of Toleration in Restoration England’, in C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough, and J.-P. Pittion (eds.), The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Emigration (Dublin, 1987), 175–203. 49. Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored:  The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), chap. 8; Kenneth Fincham, ‘ “According to Ancient Custom”: The Return of Altars in the Restoration Church of England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 13 (2003): 29–54; Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), 130–1. 50. Gilbert Burnet, The History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1897– 1900), I, 289. For ‘the frustrations of the Cavaliers’, see John Miller, After the English Civil Wars: English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II (Harlow, 2000), chap. 9. 51. Harris, Restoration, 106–14. 52. For the following two paragraphs, see Harris, Restoration, 89–94. 53. The latest figures can be found in Kevin McKenny, ‘The Restoration Land Settlement in Ireland: A Statistical Interpretation’, in Coleman A. Dennehy (ed.), Restoration Ireland: Always Settling and Never Settled (Aldershot, 2008), 39–40. See also Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2012), chap. 11.

Further Reading Buckroyd, Julia, Church and State in Scotland, 1660–1681 (Edinburgh, 1980). Clarke, Aidan, Prelude to Restoration in Ireland:  The End of the Commonwealth, 1659–1660 (Cambridge, 1999). Dennehy, Coleman A. (ed.), Restoration Ireland:  Always Settling and Never Settled (Aldershot, 2008). Fincham, Kenneth and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007). Greaves, Richard L., Deliver Us from Evil:  The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1986). Harris, Tim, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987). Harris, Tim, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London, 2005). Hutton, Ronald, The Restoration:  A  Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–1667 (Oxford, 1987). Jackson, Clare, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690:  Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003). Keeble, Neil H., The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford, 2002). Miller, John, After the English Civil Wars: English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II (Harlow, 2000). Ohlmeyer, Jane, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2012), Seaward, Paul, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1989). Southcombe, George and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion, and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010).

Pa rt  I I I

I N ST I T U T ION S A N D  AC TOR S

Chapter 13

Oliver Cromwe l l J.C. Davis

The Problem We barely know Oliver Cromwell. For all his fame and for all the ruminating on his steadfast integrity or his moral deviousness, we have insufficient reliable, unambiguous, first-hand evidence to escape the clutches of rumour and speculation. This is not to deny or undervalue the important contribution that has been made by scholars working on him in the last twenty or so years but even the most rigorous attempts to pin an incontestable understanding of ‘our chief of men’ to the evidence find themselves, at more or less critical moments, flirting with ‘if ’, ‘perhaps’, ‘it is reasonable to assume’, and ‘it may be that’. The ‘would have’ school of biography has had a long run in Cromwell studies. The problem has a number of dimensions. The archival record is patchy. Before he reaches the age of forty we feed off scraps and even for critical phases such as that determining the fate of the English republic and the emergence of the Protectorate (September 1651 to December 1653) there is no personal correspondence. Then again, perceptions of Cromwell in his own time and since have been highly contested. His deeds, achievements, and failures ensure that he remains a controversial figure. The editions of his ‘own’ words—letters and speeches (often recorded by others and, in the case of more official correspondence, most likely penned by others)—have, until the present, been unsatisfactory.1 Those words that we can take as authentic are often opaque, presenting different facets of a complex personality to different audiences or to the same audience in different situations. Among his words are a number of highly quotable and almost instantly recognizable phrases, fertile with the sense that they convey something of the real man. But those brilliant moments of illumination lurch out of the shadows at us leaving the nagging suspicion that the darkness may still contain some key we have not only not grasped but of whose existence we remain—and possibly will remain—uneasily unaware. The new critical edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches, which is currently in progress, offers the prospect of having at last a bedrock of his authenticated words and their

224  Oliver Cromwell contexts. But it would be too much to expect the problems of understanding Cromwell to be thereby eliminated. Compared, for example, with an ancient letter writer and orator like Cicero, the Cromwellian harvest of first-person documentation looks sparse and bitty.2 For all their limitations, these pathways into Cromwell’s mind have been assiduously explored and, in the last two decades, the results have been some impressive biographical essays. But they remain essays. Accordingly, a sense has grown in recent years that the biographical approach, based on close reading of Cromwell’s own words, insofar as we have them, is exhausted.3 In response we have seen a renewed resort to less direct evidence, sources other than Cromwell’s own words. Given that a considerable part of what we might credibly wish to say about any major historical figure has to be expressed with reservations, we can still point to areas where the balance of probability has been productive of a new consensus or has moved the debate in new directions. John Morrill’s penetrating and influential re-examination of the early life4 gave us a real sense of the fragility of Cromwell’s social status down to at least 1636. His political humiliation on the small stage of his home town, Huntingdon, in 1630 led him in his early thirties to sell up what was a relatively mean estate for a gentleman and become a tenant farmer in St Ives.5 We can agree with Morrill that by the end of 1639, and entering his forties, he had become ‘a radicalized puritan’6 but certainty evaporates when we try to date his conversion or spiritual rebirth. Was it a decade earlier in 1628–97 or did his apparent attempt in 1635 to have his wealthy, maternal uncle declared a lunatic, in order to secure his own inheritance from him, precipitate a spiritual crisis resulting in conversion (or perhaps even a second conversion)? Here agreement runs out and sceptics doubt that he ever acted against his uncle.8 The probability of his extempore preaching among the East Anglian godly, voiced over seventy years ago by Abbott, now seems to be generally accepted.9 We now know, with a fair degree of certainty, that he became MP for Cambridge in 1640 as the result of smart, quick-footed action by a godly clique of otherwise obscure individuals rather than as a result of aristocratic patronage.10 Interesting work has also been done on Cromwell’s relationship with money. The greed that may have been reflected in his 1635 action against his uncle (if that took place) seems anything but typical.11 For a man with considerable family responsibilities, he showed a surprisingly casual, open-handed, even restless, attitude to personal finance which might have typified a gambler were it not more likely a reflection of his reliance on providence.12 Rather than an inept blunderer in the pre-war Long Parliament, Cromwell is now to be seen as an effective and resolute front man for godly petitioners, an emerging presence in committees, relations between the two Houses, and in the Commons itself.13 Recent work on his military career has stressed his outstanding capacity as a recruiter of men and, in some cases and not so convincingly, called into question the extent of his military reputation.14 As a mature politician, we have been advised to take his radicalism more seriously and a considerable case has been made for his having a more collaborative relationship with the Levellers, at least until 1649, than had been thought to be the case.15 Equally, the whole notion of a ‘Cromwellian settlement’ in Ireland has been called into question. Rather, the Protector has been shown to be a mitigator of the harshness and rigour of

J.C. Davis   225 that settlement.16 The character of the Protectorate itself has become another controversial area as a result of new work and revised assessments. On the one hand, it has been suggested that Cromwell manipulated the system virtually at will, surrounding himself with effective but malleable and dependent councillors.17 An extreme version of this is the argument that the offer of the crown to Cromwell in 1657 was an elaborate confidence trick orchestrated by John Thurloe, his secretary, and in the promotion of which he and Cromwell acted as one.18 On the other hand, the constitutionality of his behaviour, limited by both Council and parliament, during the Protectorate, whether under the Instrument of Government or the Humble Petition and Advice, has been emphasized. In this view, it is rather compliance, verging on passivity, and frustration which typify Cromwell’s experience as the ‘single person’.19 It remains, nevertheless, the case that attempts to read Cromwell’s life using words other than his own have so far had mixed results, hedged with conditionality. For example, the claim that the progressive development of a ‘monarchical’ culture was a feature of the Protectorate from which we might read some aspects of Cromwell’s political thinking and that of his opponents20 has been met with some scepticism21 and the provisional nature of the findings of even the most skilful of its advocates has been revealing. Reliance on words other than Cromwell’s own often leads to increased recourse to ‘likelihood’, ‘may’, ‘probably’, ‘must have’, and ‘seems rather less improbable’.22 At the end of one of the most impressive recent investigations of the sources around Cromwell, rather than directly by him, Andrew Barclay concluded that none of the arguments based on one of his key sources could ‘be presented with any certainty’.23 Despite the advances recently made, we still know frustratingly little about his childhood, youth, marriage, and domestic life; about the extra-scriptural furnishing of his mind; as we know agonizingly little about his involvement in the army’s seizure of the king or the events leading up to Pride’s Purge, the precise motivation for his dramatic expulsion of the Rump, or the precise way in which his mind worked over the issue of kingship and his refusal of it. Accordingly, in too many cases we become reliant on supposition or context. We may not know much about his childhood but we know something about childhood in the period—and so on. In too many accounts the general has to do business for the particular—even though it is a particular and, in key respects, an unusual individual in whom we are interested.

Assessment and its Challenges Assessment is then a slippery business but we exacerbate the problem either by resorting to anachronistic standards or by judging him in terms of moral standards rendered inappropriate by being those of his enemies/friends. But moral judgement is not only hostage to partisanship or the imposition of our own moral standards. It is also prey to the assumption such assessments require that Cromwell was a free agent, with unimpeded choice between the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ options. Indeed, he has frequently been

226  Oliver Cromwell pictured as someone so free that his moments of apparent ‘hesitation’ require immediate explanation and may not be taken as moments when a politician faces limited options, often not of his own choosing, options which, with their possible consequences, have to be weighed carefully in the balance before an irrevocable decision is reached. Finally, there is the problem that when we have made our moral assessments our understanding of Cromwell has barely been advanced if at all. As we shall see shortly, Cromwell’s own self-assessment could be more devastatingly critical than almost anything written since. The focus of assessment has commonly been on the observance or breach of rules, be they moral, military, legal, or constitutional, to the neglect of the political figure for whom negotiation, compromise, and circumscribed room for manoeuvre were inescapable essentials. In that sense, Cromwell the warrior and regicide gets in the way of Cromwell the politician. He seldom justified himself in terms of his scrupulosity with regard to the rules whatever they might have been. His justifications came most commonly by way of his instrumentality in the hands of a God who was himself a breaker of rules, apparently indifferent to human laws and constitutions.24 In one of his own, most dramatic self-assessments, bemoaning his lack of freedom of action, he depicted himself as a front man for others and a ‘drudge upon all occasions’, someone who had negotiated away his own agency (A, IV, 417). It would be hard to find a more devastating assessment of his record but it is also one which implies that much of his politics involved collaborating with and accommodating others. Elsewhere, Cromwell identified himself as consistently struggling for religious and civil liberty (A, IV, 705). The more we look at those causes in his life the more we see that they were intertwined and repeatedly subjects both for negotiation and of frequent frustration for Cromwell. In other words, forceful as he was capable of being, Cromwell also had to engage with others through processes of negotiation and not infrequently the results appear less than congenial to him. Polarizing the man of principle and the sinuous politician, or the God-driven saint versus the calculating operator25 is to miss this essence of Cromwell the politician. If it is time to put aside, as too partisan or too simplistic and anachronistic, the moral assessment of Cromwell, we may still be left with two Cromwells in tension one with another. On the one hand, he may be the tough-minded hardliner who engaged in an all-out attack on his military commander, the earl of Manchester, or who ruthlessly crushed the Levellers, who, in the end almost by force of personality, engineered the death of the king, who forcefully and energetically suppressed the Irish and subdued the Scots, and who had the capacity (putting it delicately) to be brusque with parliaments and judges. On the other hand, we are also dealing with a man of firm religious convictions in an intolerant age who, nevertheless, sought some sort of accommodation with presbyterians (A, I, 509), Quakers (A, I, 309, 440; III, 638–9), Fifth Monarchists (A, III, 606), even with Anglicans (A, I, 501; III, 714; IV, 69, 102, 122) and, on a de facto basis with Catholics;26 or with the regicide who sought to reconcile those who had no stomach for king-killing; with the man who could show some measure of generosity towards ex-royalists; the general who, while insistent on military discipline, engaged in debate with his troops, listened to their criticism and even attended to their prayerful leading. Are these two Cromwells—the hardliner and the accommodator—reconcilable?

J.C. Davis   227 To redress the balance, bringing the political to the fore, context is, as usual, all important. There are three contextual dimensions to be stressed here. The first is that of the aspiration to a godly society which inevitably involved the virtually inextricable mix of religion and politics. Second, the dispersed nature of the distribution of authority, responsibility, and decision-taking in the early modern state meant that authority was always mediated, brokered, and subject to the complicity (or its absence) of unpaid office-holders and high rates of participation by heads of households in office-holding.27 The third dimension is an extension of this. In the substantial absence of a full-time paid bureaucracy, of party machines and of coercive capacity on a sustained basis, early modern politics, administration, and even war were to a large extent matters of negotiation and the creation, maintenance, and reconfiguration of loose coalitions.28

Negotiation, Coalition, and Political Context It may be true that all politics is coalition politics, but, in a world without, and indeed with an abhorrence of, party and party discipline, such coalitions become both more necessary and more unstable. In other words, the necessity of negotiation, persuasion, and compromise become all the more pressing.29 Early Stuart England lacked a bureaucracy or effective coercive power, and so the legitimate sovereign had to wait upon the unpaid office-holders of the counties, hundreds, parishes, and boroughs who made up the effective fabric and authority of the early modern state. A live-and-let-live attitude, punctuated by occasional flashes of coercive bullying and outright violence on either side, plus the subversion of central authority by lethargy of response, silent non-compliance, or wilful ignorance as modes of ‘resistance’ was by no means untypical of the monarchy’s exercise of sovereignty. The attempt to use the King’s Council as a goading, quasi-coercive overseer of the local implementation of policy was hard to sustain for any length of time.30 Nevertheless, the use of prerogative instruments in a systematic and sustained way to monitor, cajole, and rebuke by Charles I in the 1630s was sufficiently threatening as to be regarded as ‘tyrannical’. Given the opportunity, an essentially conservative parliament embraced a revolution bringing the system underpinning the personal rule down,31 precipitating a civil war which was both about the terms on which ‘normal’ politics could be restored and the engine productive of military, fiscal, and religious forces which would exacerbate the difficulties of doing precisely that. At the same time, the royal establishment had to abandon its ‘normal’ terms of negotiation both because its fiscal base and credit worthiness were now dependent on parliament and because these and its military incapacity had been laid bare in the Bishops’ Wars. Here was the ‘dissolution of government’ which James Harrington saw as the cause of the Britannic civil wars. But the wartime absence of a ‘normal’ centre of power/authority underwrote the already pervasive sense that these things were all about negotiation and

228  Oliver Cromwell coalitions of the willing or the persuaded.32 That perspective was further developed and enhanced by the quest for peace. So that, within as well as between the warring coalitions, negotiation was a continuing multiplicity of processes. The dimensions of those processes were further complicated as the victorious found their wartime coalitions falling apart over the vexed question of what to do with their victory. In the absence of formal party discipline, oaths might be used to engender some sort of subscriptional cohesion but their limited success threw serious politicians back on the negotiation, renegotiation, generation, maintenance, and salvaging of fragile alliances or coalitions. The politics of the 1640s and 1650s were then essentially premised on negotiation either between sides or within sides, negotiations whose foci and fronts shifted with alarming rapidity as circumstances changed. The price of any kind of political leverage was the successful and sustained negotiation of groups of supporters. Those who ceased to negotiate came to an abrupt end as political actors, as did Essex, Holles, Fairfax, and Charles I. Civil war engendered competing minority governments, competing for access to resources, men, and money, the sinews of war, which others controlled. Stopping the cycle of violence in an international and domestic context required negotiation, as did the management of violence itself, of armies and their grievances, and of volatility, of sieges and terms of surrender, of suppliers and civilian authorities, of the treatment of disabled soldiers, widows, and orphans, of indemnity for one’s own soldiers and fair treatment of the enemy’s. New to the 1640s was the use of the press to influence leverage in, and the terms of, negotiation.33 Negotiation was so central to the politics of the period, from the XIX Propositions to the Newport Treaty and beyond, that it is tempting to see the civil wars as negotiation by other means.

Cromwell’s Early Political Career in Context The most basic survey of Cromwell’s political career can be used to illustrate the growing importance of this dimension of seventeenth-century politics to him. A standard image of him before the age of forty has been that of a rather blundering, black-versus-white, holy warrior whose ineptitude and unwillingness to compromise cost him his standing in Huntingdon, for which he had been MP in 1628, and led to his exile and reduced social status in St Ives. Even so, there are examples in his early correspondence of the negotiator (A, I, 80–1). In the later 1630s, the inheritance of his almost estranged uncle’s estate brought him into some sort of working relationship with the episcopal authorities of Ely despite his aversion to the religious policies of the bishop, Matthew Wren, and this must have involved some delicate, if undocumented, negotiation. On the other hand, his election as MP for Cambridge to both the Short and Long Parliaments in 1640 was an investment in him as an uncompromising spokesman against the Laudian establishment and the likes of Matthew Wren. In the Long Parliament he began to collaborate

J.C. Davis   229 with a coalition engineered by men senior to himself among whom were several of his kinsmen and godly contacts. He may have been a junior member of that coalition but as an active committee man, manager of the presentation of petitions to the House, and go-between in relations between the two Houses negotiation was his milieu. He was even more active in what was essentially work of coalition building and maintenance after the 1641 recess.34 The importance of cohesion and its fragility in relation to, for example, the Grand Remonstrance, mounting disorder outside of parliament and the Irish insurrection was manifest. While he may have been one of a small group of men who welcomed civil war, 1642–3 saw him negotiating with local office-holders and local committees for a war effort35 and his dependence on their responses often left him in a state of near panic.36 Cromwell’s ability to recruit tended to outstrip the logistical and financial support which was in the hands of others (for examples see A, I, 211, 212, 213, 217, 218, 221, 228–9, 247, 249, 253). Backing the Protestation, a formulation of subscriptional coalition, he argued that ‘combination carries strength with it; its dreadful to adversaries’.37 But if civil war was a shattering of his political innocence,38 it was also, in a sense, a shattering of religious innocence. If the price of a quality fighting force was a conscientious army with an ecumenical approach to recruitment and promotion, it was soon apparent that one cost of this would be ceaseless negotiation between the fractious godly and prayerful attempts at reconciliation which would not always be successful (A, I, 258, 277–8, 377).39 When a Scots Covenanting army of 21,000 men entered England in 1644 it was the largest single force of the 1640s and for a while it threatened to make the Scots dominant in their alliance with the English. As a member of the newly formed Committee of Both Kingdoms, Cromwell was soon aware of this. Debates ensued over war aims, over the price for the Scots alliance, and over what form of religious settlement would satisfy the conditions of the Solemn League and Covenant. The ecumenical approach to recruitment and promotion was under pressure and signs of a Scots/presbyterian will to impose a settlement raised the question of which elements in the coalition would triumph in the event of a parliamentary victory. Inevitably, this had consequences for the prosecution of the war by, among others, both Manchester and Cromwell.40 The resultant breakdown of negotiations internal to the parliamentary coalition, which we know as the Manchester quarrel,41 was resolved by a negotiated compromise,42 the Self Denying Ordinance, the formation of the New Model Army, and a defining moment in Cromwell’s political maturation.43 The growing ascendancy of the New Model Army in 1645 and 1646 did not end these tensions as the Commons’ censoring of Cromwell’s reports after the battle of Naseby and the fall of Bristol bear witness. Cromwell clearly saw the army itself as a coalition offering an example to the parliamentary alliance in general (A, I, 377–8, 677).44 A successful army proved politically and financially costly, generating a deeply fissured coalition held together only by the necessity to achieve outright victory. That outcome brought fragmentation. It was the presbyterians, led by Holles, who, at that victorious moment, turned their backs on the wartime coalition. They sought to break the political influence and reduce the costs of the army while seeking a settlement with the defeated king.

230  Oliver Cromwell Significantly, Cromwell’s first response was to take on the role of mediator. To maintain the wartime coalition, the army must obey parliament but its reasonable grievances must also be met. In March 1647 at Saffron Walden he was urging the army to compliance with parliament. Still in November at Putney his line was that ‘the considering of what is fitt for the Kingedom does belonge to the Parliament’.45 Across this period and under considerable duress and a dawning awareness that there were serious limits to army obedience, Cromwell was ‘working to prevent the parliamentarian movement from disintegrating’.46 His main political goal remained coalition maintenance. Indeed his involvement in and support of the Heads of Proposals can be seen as an attempt at national settlement by broadening that coalition and offering something to the army, parliament, the king and his supporters and even to radicals like the Levellers.47 The king’s intransigence, his final preference for a deal with the Scots and the fear of army indiscipline put paid to that prospect. Faced with insurrection in Wales and the threat of a Scots invasion in favour of a Covenanted Charles I, Cromwell’s immediate task, in 1648, was to hold together any usable coalition and to regenerate army unity. After the officers’ prayer meeting at Windsor in late March and early April,48 that looked likely to be at the price of serving justice on Charles I, ‘that man of blood’. Nevertheless, Cromwell found time amidst his military efforts to attempt to bring independents and presbyterians together in a common ecclesiastical policy.49 Despite his victory at Preston, efforts were renewed to find a negotiated settlement and to preserve or renew a broader coalition but to no avail.50 While he lamented the failure of ‘union and right understanding’ (A, I, 677), he recognized that ‘If we cannot bring the army to our sense, we must go to theirs.’51 The last-ditch effort to save the king’s life and the House of Lords, and thereby preserve something of the wider coalition, was always compromised by the king’s intransigence and growing distrust of his reliability. Most critically these two factors had pushed the army to the limits of subordination and a prospect which haunted Cromwell from 1647 and even more strongly from 1648–9 was of a purely political army, liberated to impose its own settlement by force with the attendant risk of renewed civil war and anarchy. After the politically costly purge of parliament, the emergence of the Rump and the regicide, it was Cromwell who led the attempt to reconcile as many as possible to the new regime, to rebuild a broader coalition. ‘His instincts were to do everything possible to broaden the basis of support for the embattled regime, opening the doors to anyone willing to walk through them.’52 The ideal of limited reform, not revolution, was reflected in the eventual composition of the Rump and the Council of State and owed much to Cromwell’s influence. The threat from Ireland and Scotland was dealt with by the forceful establishment of English control and, in both theatres, Cromwell played a leading part. What is striking, however, is the degree to which he sought to maintain control on the basis of a broader coalition in both countries throughout the 1650s.53 Meanwhile, the Rump responded to the successes of Cromwell and the army in what was an increasingly frustrating manner. Dilatory on reform, obstructive of Cromwell’s attempts to reconcile moderate former royalists,54 at times the frustration verged on personal humiliation.55 Even so, he continued to hold meetings in quest of a

J.C. Davis   231 consensual approach to the republic’s problems.56 However inexplicable the expulsion of the Rump in April 1653, it remains the case that the day before that dramatic explosion of frustration Cromwell had still been attempting a negotiated way forward.57 In conversation with Bulstrode Whitelocke in November 1652, his aim, he said, had been ‘to unite our Counsels, and Hands and hearts, to make good what we have so dearly bought’. Instead they had ‘Jarrings and Animosities one against another’; the triumph of ‘private Janglings’. How, he wondered, could parliament be restrained? (A, II, 588–9). These are the words of a seeker of consensus, a coalition builder, and Cromwell was to continue down that path in the years ahead. The alternatives to negotiation, as he had realized some years before, were bleak and violent, with the potential for further civil conflict and anarchy (A, I, 599). From the coup of April 1653, through the experiment of the Nominated Assembly and on to the emergence of the Protectorate, Cromwell sought an institutional framework which would facilitate stable government by a broader coalition than merely that of the military and/or the religious zealots. A case in point is the quest for an inclusive religious settlement.58 More generally, negotiation went on to avoid a situation in which the army would be called upon to impose ever more unpopular policies at even greater fiscal and political cost. Both before and after 1653 there is a consistency and continuity in Cromwell’s stubborn persistence in seeking to resolve differences and negotiate a broader coalition than the one he was operating with.59

Negotiation and Protectoral Choice The choice facing Cromwell after the ousting of the Rump in April 1653 and the surrender of authority to him by the Nominated Assembly in December 1653 was whether to impose peace by force of arms or to make peace by building a civilian coalition to which government might be entrusted. The problem has been unacknowledged by many of his critics past and present.60 John Milton and Marchamont Nedham, for instance, supported the expulsion of the Rump but were dismayed at Cromwell’s apparently waning interest in the kind of radical reform which because of its minority support would have to be imposed by force. The dilemma was that, on the one hand and in the most difficult of circumstances, Cromwell chose to negotiate a new coalition rather than rely on military force,61 the sine qua non of imposing reform on a war weary and essentially conservative nation. On the other hand, could such a ‘conservative’ coalition be engineered while allowing some scope for liberty of conscience and some aspects of civil and legal reform? The narrower the coalition, the more imposing it would have to be.62 The broader the coalition, the more healing and settling could be made a real prospect but the harder it would be to sustain, since the more diverse the elements which had to be contained and kept on board. At its most intransigent, after 1647 there were no guarantees that an aggrieved army would not turn on its political masters. Cromwell devoted considerable

232  Oliver Cromwell energy to managing this problem, from his weekly meetings with officers in London, to tolerating Fleetwood’s and Lambert’s disruption of the work of his deputies in Scotland and Ireland.63 As we have seen, he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to win back the allegiance of former allies, like Ludlow (A, IV, 45–7, 220–2), or by talking to malcontents and those among the disgruntled saints who might stir them to action.64 When his son, Henry, was wearied by the constant sniping of the discontented, Oliver responded with the enduring faith of the coalition builder: ‘Time and patience may work them to a better frame of spirit, and see that which, for the present, is hid from them… ’ (A, IV, 26; see A, IV, 740 for him still trying to conciliate army officers in early 1658). So Cromwell blenched at the narrow coalition option and its implications and consistently tried for the broadest, sustainable alternative. But the dilemma remained: while winning new supporters, how could he keep the old ones on board as they saw their rivals achieve positions of inclusion and influence?65 For Cromwell then, the mid-1650s were arguably not a period of quasi-monarchical triumph so much as a period of endlessly frustrating and often bruising negotiation with old allies (including Ludlow, Hutchinson, Lilburne, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, army colonels, and councillors like Lambert and Fleetwood) and enemies alike (examples at A, III, 119, 125, 225, 373, 504, 546, 606–10, 639; IV, 45–6, 221–2, 230, 309). The task was made even more daunting by the aspiration to a Britannic coalition which could stabilize the archipelago, prepare it for godliness and a form of wider Protestant imperialism while preserving some of the moderate achievements of the ‘English revolution’. To some extent this meant offsetting the attempts, or perceived attempts, of others to form counter-coalitions opposed to the Protectorate.66 In other respects, it meant repeated appeals for reconciliation and union. To the Nominated Assembly that appeal was in the call for ‘respect unto all, though of different judgements’ (A, III, 62). The Instrument of Government, with its roots in the Heads of Proposals, was intended to provide an institutional framework with wide appeal (A, III, 435–8). Its ‘fundamentals’ were few and, for the rest, it was open to debate.67 Even the Major Generals can be read as a misguided attempt to appeal to the godly minorities of the counties while reducing the cost and tax burden of the military establishment. Their abandonment was a reversion to the quest for a wider basis of potential support.68 To his second protectoral parliament he appealed for ‘a common head’ against the dangers besetting them (A, IV, 270). This was indeed a coalition speech in which he described his desired relationship with the members as ‘an union, really it is an union, between you and me, and both of us united in faith and love to Jesus Christ, and to his peculiar interest in the world, that must ground this work’ (A, IV, 277). Part of the appeal of the Humble Petition and Advice was that it came with a ready-made civilian coalition. Lord Broghill, its principal patron, was, like Cromwell, a broker of political alliances.69 Oliver’s justification for rejecting the offer of the crown was, in part, that it threatened the hard-won unity of honest, godly men. He begged the committee waiting on him to ‘have a tenderness, even if possibly it be to their weakness’. A better path to unity was ‘complying, indulging and being patient unto the weaknesses and infirmities of men that have been faithful’ (A, IV, 472). This was the straining point of

J.C. Davis   233 the old coalition, just as much as accepting the crown might be a defiance of providence. ‘I would not that you should lose a friend for it’ (A, IV, 474). In retrospect we can see that this was a naive hope. Friends were lost by Oliver’s refusal. In his speech to MPs on 25 January 1658 we hear the hand-wringing over lost hopes but also the last hurrah of the coalition ideal. The country was ‘full of calamities and divisions’. That ‘consistency and agreement’ that had been required of parliament had not been forthcoming. Without their agreement, growing military arrears faced England, Scotland, and Ireland with the prospect of free-quarter in all three countries. ‘I pray God… give you one heart and mind… ’ ‘Let us have one heart and soul, one mind to maintain the honest and just rights of this nation… ’ Without such consensual politics the future was dismal. ‘Dissension, division, destruction… if we return again to folly let every man consider if it be not like to our destruction’ (A, IV, 716, 718, 719–20). It was too late. Of course, the Protectorate’s failure can be read as Cromwell’s; his lack of political skill or finesse, his choice of the wrong allies. But that case has yet to be convincingly made. Like every negotiator Cromwell had his red lines, the points beyond which there was no compromise. There could be no defying of, or consorting with those who defied providence (for example, A, I, 621). There must be liberty for tender consciences and this must extend to the weakest of God’s saints and even to passive and loyalist Anglicans and Catholics (A, II, 104; III, 590; IV, 472). On the other hand, liberty of conscience was not to be stretched to the denial of the divinity of Christ or blasphemy (A, III, 834). And there could be no public celebration of the mass, nor proselytizing by Roman Catholics (A, II, 146, 202). Clerical dominance in religious and civil life was to be ended, along with the distinction between clerical and lay (A, II, 325, 335, 340). There should be successive parliaments, not sitting permanently. Reform of the law should be a priority (A, III, 6). Cromwell was explicit and remarkably consistent about each of these so that the question arises as to whether he was too inflexible, not pliable enough about them. There is a balance then in Cromwell’s politics which may not simply be reduced to ambition versus principle. He never saw himself as a stickler for fine detail; not one glued and wedded to forms. In August 1650 he wrote to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland urging them to read Isaiah 28 verses five to fifteen with its scorn for the clerically minded for whom religion was a matter of ‘precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little’ (A, II, 307). But the escape from formality70 was never an abandonment of principle. The red lines remained. In this reading the singular importance of Cromwell, and indeed his status as a major political player in the English revolution, does not rest on his military accomplishments. Plenty of others—Fairfax, Lambert—were arguably as accomplished. Military standing gave him ‘weight’ but it was what he did with it which distinguishes him from the ruck of New Model warriors and indeed from the majority of scattered and divided, single-focus politicians. The importance of Cromwell is as a coalition builder, an early modern politician caught up in a bitterly divisive civil war who yet sought reconciliation, ‘healing and settling’, to make rather than to impose peace. For a poet like Edmund

234  Oliver Cromwell Waller, he was a bridge builder, moderator, mediator, promoting union over faction, consolidation after conquest.71 A major consequence of Cromwell’s coalition building activities was that they provided material not only for admirers but also for those hostile to him. The negotiator was all too easy to identify as the Machiavellian schemer bent on personal aggrandizement. The problem which persists72 with the latter approach is that of explaining the opportunities to increase his personal power and influence which Cromwell shunned or neglected—for instance on his triumphant return from the battle of Worcester, after the expulsion of the Rump, or when offered the crown by parliament. For contemporaries committed to their version of the cause (Lilburne, Ludlow) or lacking his interest in a solution which would reconcile all, friends and, to some extent, foes (Vane, Milton, Nedham, Baxter) Cromwell could be seen, as coalitions and their terms shifted, as frustrating or betraying their hopes. Their appraisals should be treated with caution as either failing to grasp what he was about or unwilling to acknowledge the consequences of the abandonment of his project.

Reputational Consequences The two Cromwells are then, not the man of integrity versus the manipulative and deceitful politician but, on the one hand, the negotiator, conciliator, reconciler, and coalition builder, and on the other, the man whose ‘red lines’ as a negotiator obliged him, in extremis, to resort to coercive and disciplinary means. But those red lines are what give him the appearance of an honourable integrity and prompt the admiration of ‘principled’ commentators. They may, nevertheless, be what ultimately cost him his best hope of achieving a broader settlement. We should not, however, be too ready to assume the inevitability of this in either an English or a Britannic context. Had he, for example, been willing to abandon the cause of liberty of conscience might a firm coalition with presbyterians and moderate episcopalians, such as that achieved by his successor, have proved more sustainable? Recent work on Cromwell’s parliaments has stressed the willingness of English, Scots, and Irish communities to engage with them. His persistence, despite the frustrations, with representative government can be seen as the maintenance of a forum for national and Britannic negotiation. The endorsement of conciliar ordinances for union of the three kingdoms by parliamentary legislation was vigorously promoted by Irish and Scots members and frustrated only by parliamentary timetables and the priority given by English members to debates on other constitutional matters. The current consensus is that Cromwell’s parliaments came closer to uniting the three kingdoms and engaging communities throughout them than has hitherto been acknowledged. It may have been the prospect of Richard Cromwell’s building on that partial success, rather than his weakness, which precipitated the army coup against him which brought the Protectorate down.73 Recent work has again laid emphasis on honour as a key value for those on either side in the civil wars and, indeed, even for turncoats.74 Thomas Hobbes, so often identified

J.C. Davis   235 as the expounder of a politics driven by fear, saw the three great determinants of a political culture as honour, fear, and profit and in that order.75 But Cromwell’s political lexicon is almost devoid of the language of honour. The exception (and it is a narrow one) is military honour involving the observance of the articles of war and surrender.76 For the writers of the new vogue of prose romances all characters, except Cromwell, were struggling to maintain or regain their personal honour.77 In his post-Restoration critique of the Protectorate, Slingsby Bethel, pointed scorn at the Protector not only for his misconceived foreign policy but for his willingness to ignore the demands of honour.78 But honour, as those who negotiated with the devious Charles I came to realize, induced inflexibility and brought negotiation to an end. The potential violence of early modern political culture and social life, from the duel to aristocratic rebellion, had much to do with honour. The ideal of modern liberal politics has been depicted as a ‘reasonable pluralism’, the establishment of which is dependent on negotiation to establish overlapping consensus.79 In that sense, did Cromwell, with his lack of interest in honorific codes and pursuit of the broader coalition, represent a new politics; one which appealed not to honour but to the negotiation of common ground and the pursuit of common interests? It has been suggested that the reconciliation which Cromwell sought to achieve in the 1650s was an impossible reconciliation of incompatible elements, a coalition too far.80 Certainly, collaborative rapprochement between parliament, the army, and the godly was difficult to achieve. Maintaining the army was expensive and unpopular with parliament; the majority of MPs wanted a return to religious discipline and conformity, while key players in the military were implacably opposed to the forcing of tender consciences. Cromwell’s persistence in attempting to bridge these gaps worried both his secretary, John Thurloe, and his son, Henry.81 But the costs of abandoning the attempt were also potentially substantial. Any imposed, or non-consensual, settlement meant a military settlement. Could this be achieved without further expansion and professionalization of the New Model Army, increasing fiscal and logistical demands, and the new modelling of the state to meet those demands; in other words, the sweeping away of the old regime’s monarchical (or unacknowledged) republic and its replacement by something more approximate to a modern centralized, bureaucratic, and militarized state? In this context, Cromwell looks more like a tragic than a tyrannical figure. Revolution was impossible without tyranny as understood in the seventeenth century and Cromwell proved not to have the stomach for that kind of revolution. Reconciliation—healing and settling—depended on the good will and ability to compromise of others as well as of himself. In his political maturity, he was a non-revolutionary in the sense that he wanted to negotiate with the establishment rather than destroy it. In the end that establishment’s key representative made that impossible. But, disrupted as it might be, for Cromwell the negotiation went on.82 He was radical in the sense that he always wanted to negotiate with the establishment on his terms not theirs although in his support for the Heads of Proposals terms were stretched in the direction of the establishment as far as they were ever likely to go.

236  Oliver Cromwell

Conclusion Twenty years ago, Conrad Russell identified three long-term causes of instability underpinning the dissolution of Stuart government: managing multiple kingdoms, maintaining confessional unity in the face of plurality of religions, and the generation of a military/fiscal state.83 Under the Protectorate only the first of these had been brought under what was beginning to look like stable management through a combination of military force and negotiated coalitions. Religion may have looked as if it were settling but remained unstable. Cromwell approached the military/fiscal problem by cutting taxation and reducing the armed forces but he could not achieve the latter fast enough to keep up with the former.84 Consequently, he bequeathed a debt crisis to his son but it is worth noting George Monck’s advice to Richard: essentially, broaden your coalition base by identifying your rule with ‘those of power and interest among the people’.85 Ironically Oliver may, in his last years, have been seeking to unwind what elements of a military fiscal state had been achieved since 1642, thus anticipating the military and foreign policy weaknesses of the restored Stuarts. In religious terms, the Restoration alternative to Cromwellian ‘license’ was repression and persecution sponsored by the parliamentary classes with whom Cromwell had found it so difficult to negotiate. Whatever we make of his achievements and failures, it is clear that Cromwell did not engineer a coalition wide and stable enough to make ‘healing and settling’ a sustainable reality.86 After him, British politics came to be dominated by division and adversarial antagonism such that opposition had finally to be institutionalized. In making and sustaining such alliances honour has to be at a discount. In this world, the sticklers for their honour, like Charles I, come to a more or less sticky end.87 Cromwell the soldier was sensitive to the observance of terms negotiated, of military honour. Equally, divine providence would always determine outcomes. But God’s chosen instruments had to recognize His freedom of choice. His instruments were diverse as were their commissions and the saint had to respect this. So politics for Cromwell was, under God’s overall determining, not about honour so much as closing the deal, winning over others, and forging or renewing alliances, above all in appealing to the interests of potential partners.88 And this was the direction in which politics was to go and has gone ever since. With his sensitivity to the politically negotiable rather than to honour, Cromwell may then be the first of the new politicians.

Notes 1. Carlyle’s editions are forceful but careless while the ‘standard’ edition, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (Cambridge, Mass., 1937–1947), ed. W. C. Abbott, is fatally flawed. See John Morrill, ‘Textualizing and Contextualizing Cromwell’, Historical Journal [HJ], 33 (1990): 629–39.

J.C. Davis   237 2. Peter White, Cicero in Letters (Oxford, 2010). 3. See, for example, Patrick Little, ‘Introduction’, in Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), 2–3 (and the review of this book by Ronald Hutton at Reviews in History: ). Andrew Barclay, Electing Cromwell: The Making of a Politician (London, 2011), 3–4. 4. John Morrill, ‘The Making of Oliver Cromwell’, in Morrill (ed.), Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990), 19–48. 5. See also Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 9–10. 6. John Morrill, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2007), 9. 7. Morrill, Oliver Cromwell, 5–6. 8. See Patrick Little, ‘Introduction’, in Little (ed.), New Perspectives, 13; Simon Healy, ‘1636: The Unmaking of Oliver Cromwell’, in Little (ed.), New Perspectives, 28–9; Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 11. 9. See Abbott, Writings and Speeches, II, 51. References to this work will henceforward be in parentheses in the text in the form of A followed by volume and page(s) number(s). 10. Barclay, Electing Cromwell, chaps. 2–8. Compare Morrill, ‘Making’, 44–5. 11. David Farr, ‘Oliver Cromwell and a 1647 Case in Chancery’, Historical Research 71 (1998): 314–17. 12. Healy, ‘Unmaking’, 28–31; Ian Gentles, Oliver Cromwell:  God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2011), chap. 10. 13. Stephen K. Roberts, ‘ “One that Would Sit Well at the Mark”: The Early Parliamentary Career of Oliver Cromwell, 1640–1642’, in Little (ed.), New Perspectives, 38–63. The view of Cromwell as a rather more serious player in the early years of the Long Parliament had been anticipated in Sir Charles Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England (Oxford, 1953, 1966), 53–5. 14. Gentles, Cromwell, 24; Peter Young, ‘Cromwell as a Military Leader’, Cromwelliana (1975): 21; Alan Marshall, Oliver Cromwell, Soldier: The Military Life of a Revolutionary at War (London, 2004), 273. 15. Philip Baker, ‘ “A Despicable Contemtible Generation of Men”? Cromwell and the Levellers’, in Little (ed.), New Perspectives, 90–113. 16. See, for example, John Cunningham, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the “Cromwellian” Settlement of Ireland’, HJ, 53 (2010): 919–37. 17. Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Council’, in Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007), 82–104; Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars, 1640– 1660 (London, 2009), 130, 135; Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Protectorate’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 20 (2010): 57–83. 18. Patrick Little, ‘John Thurloe and the Offer of the Crown to Oliver Cromwell’, in Little (ed.), New Perspectives, 216–40, especially 232–3, 235–6. 19. Peter Gaunt, ‘ “The Single Person’s Confidants and Dependents”? Oliver Cromwell and his Protectoral Coucillors’, HJ, 32 (1989): 537–60; Gaunt, ‘The Protectoral Ordinances of 1653–4 Reconsidered’, in Little (ed.), Cromwellian Protectorate, 105–26; Derek Hirst, ‘The Lord Protector’, in Morrill (ed.), Cromwell and the English Revolution, chap. 5; Morrill, Cromwell, 83, 87. 20. The pioneering work here was Roy Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell: King in All But Name, 1653–1658 (Stroud, 1997). See also Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth Century Politics (Cambridge, 2000), 22, 214–17. Paul M. Hunneyball, ‘Cromwellian Style: The Architectural Trappings of the Protectoral Regime’, in Little (ed.),

238  Oliver Cromwell The Cromwellian Protectorate, 53–81. Andrew Barclay, ‘The Lord Protector and his Court’, in Little (ed.), New Perspectives, 195–215. 21. Tim Wilks, ‘Art, Architecture and Politics’, in Barry Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2009), 199; Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic:  The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–53 (Manchester, 1997), 105; Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge, 2000), 3, 8, 108–9, 123; Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘The Politics of Portraiture: Oliver Cromwell and the Plain Style’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998): 1282–1319; Joad Raymond, ‘An Eye-Witness to King Cromwell’, History Today, 47 (1997), 38, 39: Simon Thurley, ‘The Stuart Kings, Oliver Cromwell and the Chapel Royal 1618–1685’, Architectural History, 45 (2002): 238–74. 22. Barclay, ‘Lord Protector’, 198–9; Morrill, Cromwell, 8, 70, 73–4; Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 75, 100. 23. Barclay, Electing Cromwell, 177. 24. J. C. Davis, ‘Living with the Living God: Radical Religion and the English Revolution’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), 19–41. 25. Compare Gentles, Cromwell, xvii. 26. Albert J. Loomis, ‘Oliver Cromwell’s Policy Toward the English Catholics: The Appraisal by Diplomats, 1654–1658’, Catholic Historical Review, 90 (2004): 29–44: Morrill, Cromwell, 94; Bernard Capp, ‘Cromwell and Religion in a Multi-Faith Society’, in Jane A. Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012), 93–112. 27. Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire:  A  New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 61, 63, 67 (emphasizing the dependence of local government ‘on a degree of consensus-building and informal negotiations’) and the references there. 28. Compare Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–53 (Cambridge, 1974), 27. For Cromwell as a coalition builder as well as a follower of providence see Worden, ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’, Past and Present, 109 (1985): 95. For an important alternative approach to the issue of negotiating power in early modern England see Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001). 29. Barbara Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army: Causes, Character, and Results of Military Opposition to Cromwell’s Protectorate’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 42 (1978–9): 39 for Cromwell’s mixture of firmness, conciliation, and clemency (the tools of the negotiator). 30. See, for example, Derek Hirst, ‘The Privy Council and the Problems of Enforcement in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies [JBS], 18 (1978): 46–66. 31. David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006). 32. Michael J.  Braddick, ‘History, Liberty, Reformation and the Cause:  Parliamentary, Military and Ideological Escalation in 1643’, in Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (eds.), The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill (Cambridge, 2011), 124; David Scott, ‘Rethinking Royalist Politics, 1642–9’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflicts and Contexts, 1640–49 (London, 2009), 38, 46, 51, 59–60. 33. This may be an aspect of Cromwell’s early grasp of the importance of print. S. L. Sadler, ‘ “Lord of the Fens”: Oliver Cromwell’s Reputation and the First Civil War’, in Little (ed.), New Perspectives, 77–8. 34. Roberts, ‘Early Parliamentary Career’.

J.C. Davis   239 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

Gentles, Cromwell, 18, 40. Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974), 81, 92. Roger Howell, Jr., Cromwell (London, 1977), 31–2. Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1992), 24. For the importance of reconciliation in godly communities, see Roger Thompson, From Deference to Defiance: Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1629–1692 (Boston, MA, 2012), 435. Malcolm Wanklyn, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Performance of Parliament’s Armies in the Newbury Campaign 20 October–21 November 1644’, History, 96 (2011): 3–25. For an important sidelight on this and the emergent alliance between the Fairfaxes and Cromwell (among others) see Andrew Hopper (ed.), The Papers of the Hothams, Governors of Hull During the Civil War, Camden Fifth Series, 39 (Cambridge, 2011), 29. For the background see David Scott, ‘The “Northern Gentlemen”, the Parliamentary Independents, and Anglo-Scottish Relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ, 42 (1999): 347–75. Keith Lindley and David Scott (eds.), The Journal of Thomas Juxon, 1644–1661, Camden Fifth Series, 13 (Cambridge, 1999), 36; Bennett, Cromwell, 95. John Bruce and David Masson (eds.), The Quarrel Between the Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell, Camden Society, New Series XII (1875). See also the insightful comments of M. A. Barg, The English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century Through Portraits of the Leading Figures (Moscow, 1990), 144. C. H. Firth (ed.), The Clarke Papers, 2 vols. (London, 1992), I, 370. Morrill, Cromwell, 31–2, also 34, 37. For the Heads of Proposals see John Adamson, ‘The English Nobility and the Projected Settlement of 1647’, HJ, 30 (1987): 567–603. For Cromwell’s relationship with the Levellers see Baker, ‘Cromwell and the Levellers’. For Cromwell as the negotiator at Putney see A, I, 519, 534, 540, 544. William Allen, A Faithful Memorial (London, 1659). Robert S.  Paul, The Lord Protector:  Religion and Politics in the Life of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1955), 161. John Morrill and Philip Baker, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zeruiah’, in David L. Smith (ed.), Cromwell and the Interregnum (Oxford, 2003), 15–36. Howell, Cromwell, 105. Morrill, Cromwell, 51, 55, 56; Worden, The Rump, 64–7; Gentles, Cromwell, 77–8, 146. For Ireland see A, II, 146, 202–5, 241–3, 257, 264, 283–8; James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin, 1999); John Morrill, ‘The Drogheda Massacre in Cromwellian Context’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2010), 242–65; Toby Barnard, ‘Cromwell’s Irish Reputation’, in Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy, 191–218; Morrill, Cromwell, 70; Cunningham, ‘ “Cromwellian” Settlement’. For the attempt to build as wide as possible a coalition in relation to his activities in Scotland see A, II, 277, 283–8, 328–9, 335–46; Firth, Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans, 278; Gentles, Cromwell, 122, 126; John D. Grainger, Cromwell Against the Scots: The Last Anglo-Scottish Wars, 1650–52 (East Lothian, 1997), 36, 51; Laura M. Stewart, ‘Cromwell and the Scots’, in Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy, 173, 177–9. But see also Derek Hirst, ‘The English Republic and the Meaning of Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 66 (1994): 451–86. David L.  Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–1649 (Cambridge, 1994), 271; George F.  Warner (ed.), The Nicholas Papers, 2  vols., Camden Society, New Series, 40, 50 (1886, 1892), I, 268.

240  Oliver Cromwell 55. John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in Crisis:  1652 Revisited’, Parliamentary History, 30 (2011): 194–9, 210–13. 56. For example, A, II, 505–7; Bennett, Cromwell, 197–8, 206. 57. Ivan Roots (ed.), Cromwell: A Profile (London, 1973), 75; Worden, The Rump, 1. 58. Ann Hughes, ‘Religion 1640–1660’, in Coward (ed.), Companion, 359. 59. There is abundant evidence of this. See, for instances, A, III, 434–43, 451–2, 510–11, 579–93. 60. See, for example, Blair Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism’, in David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society (Stanford, 1994), 75. 61. Austin Woolrych, ‘The Cromwellian Protectorate: A Military Dictatorship?’ History, 75 (1990): 207–31. For Henry Cromwell’s defence of his father as eschewing the maintenance of government by force of arms see Robert W. Ramsey, Henry Cromwell (London, 1933), 39–40. The difference, in his view, was between using the sword to restore people to their rights and privileges or in order to rob and despoil them. 62. Addressing the republican exclusivity of Vane, Milton, Nedham, Baxter, and Stubbe, James Harrington proposed a radical inclusivity, significantly choosing Cromwell as his would-be patron. Ruth E.  Mayer, ‘Real and Practicable, not Imaginary and Notional:  Sir Henry Vane’s A Healing Question and the Problems of the Protectorate’, Albion, 27 (1995): 37–72; Jonathan Scott, ‘James Harrington’s Prescription for Healing and Settling’, in Braddick and Smith (eds.), Experience of Revolution, 190–209. 63. Patrick Little, ‘The Irish and Scottish Councils and the Dislocation of the Protectoral Union’, in Little (ed.), Cromwellian Protectorate, 127–42; Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), 106–7. 64. This is where I take issue with the judgement of Clive Holmes that Cromwell by 1657 was washing his hands of the saints. Compare Clive Holmes, Why was Charles I Executed? (London, 2006), 155–7. 65. See, for example, the accusation that he was too ingratiating of the old Presbyterians. Robert Pitilloh, The Hammer of Persecution (1659), 11. For the complex interaction and competition between such coalitions at both local and national levels see Derek Hirst, ‘The Fracturing of the Cromwellian Allaince: Leeds and Adam Baynes’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993): 868–94. 66. For example, Charles Harding Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 2 vols. (London, 1909 edn), I, 5–6. 67. Patrick Little and David L.  Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, 2007), 294–5. 68. Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government During the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001). 69. Little, Broghill. 70. J. C. Davis, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, in Morrill (ed.), Cromwell and the English Revolution, 181–208. 71. Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate:  Culture, Politics and Institutions (Oxford, 2008), 88–92, 109. 72. Worden, Civil Wars, 128, 130, 135, 145–6. 73. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 232–8, chap. 12. 74. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, chap. 4; Barbara Donagan, ‘The Web of Honour: Soldiers, Christians and Gentlemen in the English Civil War’, HJ, 44 (2001): 365–89; Monica Patterson-Tutschka, ‘Honour Thy King: Honouring as a Royalist Theory of Praxis in Civil

J.C. Davis   241 War England 1640–1660’, History of Political Thought, 32 (2011): 465–98; Andrew James Hopper, ‘The Self-Fashioning of Gentry Turncoats during the English Civil Wars’, JBS, 49 (2010): 1–22. For the aspiration to honour in early modern England and the modern literature on it see Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2010), chap. 5. 75. Thomas Hobbes, Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War, Written by Thucydides The Son of Olorus, in Sir William Molesworth (ed.), The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vols. 8 and 9 (London, 1843), I, 82. 76. Even so, see Marshall, Cromwell: Soldier, 274 for the view that Cromwell’s military aims were not glory and honour but ‘a just peace and a righteous religious settlement’. 77. See, for example, [Richard Braithwaite,] Panthalia (1659), 114–18; [Percy Herbert,] The Princess Cloria… Written by a Person of Honour (1661), 529; [Roger Boyle,] Parthenissa (1669), 60–90. The last of these was by the onetime Lord Broghill and laid great stress on honour as essential to civil life. 78. [Slingsby Bethel,] The World’s Mistake in Oliver Cromwell (1668), 2, 15, 16. 79. John Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (New York, 2005), 147, see also 441. 80. Holmes, Why was Charles I Executed?, 152; Gentles, Cromwell, 153, 177, 198–203. 81. Ramsey, Henry Cromwell, 244. His son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, was also worried by Cromwell’s conciliatory attitudes towards Irish Catholics and English royalists. Patrick Little, ‘Cromwell and Sons: Oliver Cromwell’s Intended Legacy’, in Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy, 22. 82. Compare Roger Howell, Jr., ‘Cromwell and English Liberty’, in R. C. Richardson (ed.), Images of Oliver Cromwell:  Essays for and by Roger Howell, Jr. (Manchester, 1993), 164 for Cromwell’s continuing faith in the resolution of problems by discussion and mutual understanding. 83. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), chap. 9. 84. James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth Century England (Stroud, 1999), 83, 192. 85. Holmes, Why was Charles I Executed?, 181. For the attempt to rehabilitate Richard see Jason Peacey, ‘The Protector Humbled: Richard Cromwell and the Constitution’, in Little (ed.), Cromwellian Protectorate, 32–52. 86. For the case that it was always a matter of a minority agenda searching for majority support see David L. Smith, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the First Protectorate Parliament and Religious Reform’, Parliamentary History, 19 (2000): 38–48. 87. For honour as a key preoccupation for Charles I see Richard Cust, Charles I (London, 2007). 88. Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982), 397. C. V. Wedgwood’s ‘unbending’ Cromwell probably owed something to Carlyle: Wedgwood, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1939). Ivan Roots was one of the first to depict Cromwell’s political persona as ‘inconsistent and ambivalent, diffuse and contradictory’: Roots (ed.), Profile, p. viii. See also Worden, Civil Wars, 130 for an emphasis on less principled flexibility.

Further Reading Barclay, Andrew, Electing Cromwell: The Making of a Politician (London, 2011). Coward, Barry, The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester, 2002). Coward, Barry, Oliver Cromwell (Harlow, 1991).

242  Oliver Cromwell Davis, J. C., Oliver Cromwell (London, 2001). Durston, Christopher, Cromwell’s Major-Generals:  Godly Government During the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001). Gaunt, Peter, Oliver Cromwell (London, 1997). Gentles, Ian, Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2011). Little, Patrick (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007). Little, Patrick (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009). Little, Patrick and David L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, 2007). Morrill, John (ed.), Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990). Morrill, John, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2007). Smith, David L. (ed.), Cromwell and the Interregnum (Oxford, 2003).

Chapter 14

Parliaments a nd C onstitu t i ons David L. Smith

Introduction The recent turn towards three kingdoms perspectives on political developments, when applied to representative institutions, has shed much new light on the formation of such institutions in each of the three kingdoms while also raising interesting questions about the interrelations between them. From dissimilar starting points they found themselves facing similar pressures, and these in turn produced contrastive results. To understand them alongside each other has proved immensely illuminating, and has opened up important new research questions. New resources, and novel ways of accessing familiar primary sources, will make this subject much easier to study in the future. Beyond this lies the still larger question of how these institutions served to create and represent political elites, and thus of how these societies worked politically. In 1640, at the beginning of the English revolution, and again in 1660, at the Restoration, the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland each had their own separate parliament with its own distinctive structures and traditions. The thrust of much recent research on all three parliaments has been to stress that these were royal institutions: they formed part of the machinery of monarchical government rather than a counterweight to it, and they were useful (if at times problematic) institutions that provided the monarch with advice, legislation, and taxation. They remained royal courts and councils, and they were summoned and dismissed entirely at the monarch’s discretion. The operation of these parliaments was shaped largely by custom and precedent, and there were no written constitutions. During the revolutionary period of the 1640s and 1650s, this picture changed radically. All three kingdoms saw determined and highly effective attempts to curtail the monarch’s authority over parliament and to guarantee the existence of regular parliaments independently of the monarch’s will. New structures were created—especially in

244   Parliaments and Constitutions the form of committees—to give parliaments a more continuous institutional existence and to reinforce the authority of their members even during the intervals between sessions. Although these innovations were to some extent variations on a theme, the exact form that they took was different in each kingdom. Then, most dramatically of all, in 1649–51 the English Commonwealth conquered Scotland and Ireland, and in 1653 the Protectorate was established with a British parliament containing representatives from all three kingdoms. This was regulated for the first time by a written constitution, the Instrument of Government, and a second, modified constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice, followed in 1657. These developments thus marked a complete reversal of the situation that obtained before 1640 and after 1660: instead of an unwritten constitution in which three separate parliaments existed within a multiple monarchy, there was a written constitution that defined the workings of a single parliament within a unitary republican state. This chapter will try to explain how and why these remarkable changes came about. It will analyse the aims of the members of parliament in each kingdom, the challenges they faced, and how they sought to overcome them. We will trace the relationship between parliaments and constitutions, and the modifications that were made to parliaments as institutions. We will follow parliaments on a journey that came to an end with the Restoration of the Stuarts, and assess whether or not the arrangements after 1660 represented a complete return to those that had existed before the revolution. First, therefore, we need to start by examining the nature of the parliaments in each kingdom at the beginning of the revolutionary period.

Parliaments in 1640 In 1640, the three parliaments of the Stuart monarchy presented a picture of diversity. The most obvious common denominator was that they were all ruled by Charles I and therefore had to find ways of coping with his often authoritarian style of kingship. Beyond that, each of the parliaments could be regarded as the odd one out in the group depending on what criteria are applied. The parliament of England (and Wales) was the largest of the three, the most powerful, and also the one with the longest interval since its last meeting in 1629. It was bicameral, and consisted of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. In the Lords sat the twenty-six bishops (including the archbishops of Canterbury and York) together with the lay peerage, which in 1640 numbered 123, and certain senior officers of state and legal ‘assistants’. The members of the Commons comprised ninety knights of the shire (two for each English county and one for each Welsh), and 417 burgesses who represented the towns and cities. The knights of the shire were chosen by those inhabitants who owned freehold land worth at least forty shillings a year. In the towns and cities the franchise was defined by the borough’s charter, and here the qualification varied immensely: freedom of the borough, membership of the corporation, ownership of certain levels of

DAVID L. Smith   245 wealth or types of property were all used in different places, and could produce an electorate of anywhere between over two thousand and less than ten.1 In practice, in both shire and borough elections, most members were selected by informal processes of consultation and negotiation, and only where these time-honoured mechanisms broke down did an election take place.2 The English parliament met twice in 1640: first in the Short Parliament which Charles I dissolved after three weeks (13 April–5 May), and then in the Long Parliament, which assembled on 3 November and whose existence did not definitively end until March 1660. Members were in a very touchy mood, conscious that the previous parliament in 1628–9 had seen a breakdown in relations with the king, and resentful that Charles had avoided calling another for eleven years. As a result, as soon as parliament met there was a bitter outpouring of religious, political, and legal grievances that had accumulated during Charles’s personal rule. The king’s decision to recall parliament in England arose from his failure to quell the Covenanter rebellion in his northern kingdom. The Scottish parliament was the only one in the Stuart monarchies that consisted of a single chamber in which all three estates were represented. The General Assembly had abolished the clerical estate in 1638: as a result, when the parliament next met on 31 August 1639 the three estates were redefined as the nobility, the commissioners of the shires (in effect the gentry), and the commissioners of the burghs. This reform was confirmed by the act ‘anent the constitution of the present and all future Parliaments’ of 2 June 1640, a measure which also granted the two commissioners from each shire one vote each, rather than one per shire, thereby doubling at a stroke the voting power of the parliamentary gentry who lay at the heart of the Covenanting movement. The parliament which assembled in August 1639 consisted of fifty nobles, forty-seven gentry representing twenty-five shires, and fifty-two burgesses representing fifty-one burghs.3 Historically, the Scottish parliament had been managed through the Lords of the Articles, a committee in which the crown nominated representatives of the nobles (and hitherto the bishops) who then chose representatives of the shires and burghs. This had previously given the monarch considerable control over parliamentary proceedings, as in the Jacobean parliaments or Charles I’s coronation parliament of 1633, but by 1639 the Covenanters were demanding that the Lords of the Articles be abolished, or at least reformed. If the Scottish parliament was unusual in being unicameral, the Irish parliament was modelled very closely on the English structure of a House of Lords and a House of Commons. In 1640, the Lords contained the twenty-four Irish bishops together with ninety-nine lay peers, roughly two-thirds of whom were Protestant New English, and about a third non-resident. The Commons contained 235 members representing eighty-eight borough and thirty-two county constituencies, and chosen on an English-style franchise. Among these members, Protestants outnumbered Catholics by 161 to seventy-four, figures which reflected Strafford’s attempt to weaken the Catholic presence by reducing the number of borough constituencies from ninety-five in the previous parliament of 1634–5. The distinctiveness of the Irish parliament lay in the fact that it was the parliament most directly controlled from outside its own kingdom, through Poynings’ Law (1494) which stated that no Irish parliament could meet without a licence

246   Parliaments and Constitutions from the English monarch, and that no bill could be introduced into it unless it had the approval of the king and privy council in England. In 1541, the Act of Kingly Title stipulated that Ireland was ‘united and knit to the imperial crown of the realm of England’, thus making Ireland a dependency of the English crown.4 The Irish parliament was nevertheless very careful to defend its independence from the parliament of England. With the king’s approval, Strafford summoned it to meet on 16 March 1640, principally in order to raise money and men against the Scots, but it soon became clear that his policies as Lord Deputy since 1633 had alienated many of the New English as well as the Old Irish and the Old English. Despite his attempts to secure a pliable assembly with a Protestant majority in both Houses, the parliament was determined to put an end to Strafford’s rule. Prominent among its immediate goals were the creation of direct channels of communication with the monarch, and the repeal, or at least suspension, of Poynings Law.5 The crisis of the late 1630s in Scotland thus led to the recall of parliament not only there but in England and Ireland as well. These parliaments rapidly became the institutional foci for resistance to Charles I’s regime. Their assembly provided an opportunity for members to demand redress of grievances and to promote reforms that involved fundamental constitutional changes in each kingdom.

Parliaments and the Constitutional Settlements of 1640–2 A central aim of these reforms was to strengthen the position of parliaments in relation to royal authority. The Scottish parliament led the way in this process.6 The Triennial Act (6 June 1640) established that a ‘full and frie’ parliament was to be held at least every three years, while a further Act of 10 June asserted that parliament was the highest court of the realm, and had the right to assemble at regular intervals and on its own authority. The monarch thus lost the discretionary power to choose when to summon parliament. The Lords of the Articles were reconstituted as an optional body, and instead a Committee of Estates was to sit in the intervals between parliamentary sessions. This Committee comprised twelve nobles, sixteen gentry, and twelve burgesses, each chosen by the relevant Estate, and it wielded extensive fiscal and military powers. In September 1641, further legislation gave parliament the right to approve the monarch’s choice of officers of state, privy councillors, and lords of session, again giving parliamentary control over decisions that had hitherto been at the royal discretion. The significance of these reforms was not lost on contemporaries, and the antiquary Sir James Balfour wrote that the Scottish constitutional settlement of 1640–1 in effect ‘ouerturned not onlie the ancient state gouernment, bot fettered monarchie with chynes and sett new limits and marckes to the same, beyond wich it was not legally to proceed’.7 This Scottish settlement provided a constitutional model for the English parliament in a way that reveals how much the parliaments of the three kingdoms could learn

DAVID L. Smith   247 from each other in this period.8 One of the Long Parliament’s earliest priorities was to emulate the Scottish Triennial Act, and an English version was passed on 15 February 1641. Charles’s control over the sitting of parliament was further curtailed by an Act of 11 May 1641 which forbade the adjournment, prorogation, or dissolution of the Long Parliament ‘unless it be by themselves or by their own order’.9 Parliament also set about impeaching those advisers most closely associated with Charles’s personal rule. In close cooperation with members of the Irish parliament, they attempted to impeach Strafford, and when this failed he was attainted and executed on 12 May 1641. The following month, in the Ten Propositions, parliament requested that the King appoint to his Council ‘such officers and counsellors as his people and parliament have just cause to confide in’, thereby seeking to imitate the Scots in curtailing Charles’s freedom to choose his own advisers.10 The Irish parliament, meanwhile, was pursuing its own programme of constitutional reform. Having secured Strafford’s execution, and determined to restrict the powers of the executive, the parliament insisted that the Irish judges answer the twenty-one ‘Queries’ exploring the legality of Strafford’s rule in Ireland. Then, in July 1641, the Irish House of Commons asserted that ‘the subjects of this His Majesty’s kingdom are a free people… to be governed only according to the common law of England, and statutes made and established by the parliament in this kingdom of Ireland, and according to the lawful customs used in the same’.11 The Irish parliament also sought the repeal, or at least the suspension, of Poynings’ Law. All these measures commanded a high level of support among both Catholic and Protestant members. In late October, however, the Irish parliament was overtaken by events: a Catholic rebellion broke out in the north of the country, and to make matters even worse, the rebel leaders claimed to be acting on a commission (almost certainly forged) from Charles I himself. News of the Irish rebellion and the alleged royal commission prompted the Long Parliament to draw up far-reaching constitutional demands in the form of the Grand Remonstrance of 22 November 1641. These included parliamentary approval of the king’s choice of advisers, a demand that Charles blankly refused on the grounds that it was ‘the undoubted right of the Crown of England to call such persons to our secret counsels… as we shall think fit’.12 Instead, on 4 January 1642, in a flagrant breach of parliamentary privilege, he attempted to arrest five of his leading critics in the Commons and one in the Lords. The two Houses responded by developing a radical new doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. They asserted that in such an emergency they could legislate by passing ordinances which had the force of law even though they had not received the royal assent. This idea, first expressed in the Militia Ordinance of 5 March 1642, was based on the revolutionary claim that ‘the King’s supreme and royal pleasure is exercised and declared in this High Court of law and council, after a more eminent and obligatory manner than it can be by personal act or resolution of his own’.13 Once parliament adopted this position, the outbreak of civil war in England was only a matter of time, and Charles raised his standard against the parliamentary ‘rebels’ at Nottingham on 22 August 1642.

248   Parliaments and Constitutions

The Constitutional Impact of War on Parliaments, 1642–9 The interlocking conflicts of the 1640s, sometimes called the wars of the three kingdoms, had a profound constitutional impact on all three parliaments. This impact was complex and reflected not only the distinctive traditions of each parliament but also the fast-moving events of the war in each theatre. The strongest resemblances were between the Scottish and the English parliaments, especially in their creation of an elaborate committee structure, and here again the Long Parliament learnt from and drew on models that had already been pioneered north of the border. The Scottish parliament of 1639–41 made provision for two main categories of parliamentary committees:  session committees, which met while the parliament was in session, and interval committees, which met during the intervals between sessions. The most important of the interval committees were the Committee of Estates, the Commission for the Conservators of the Peace, the Committee for the Common Burdens, and the Committee for Brotherly Assistance. These bodies, which included some gentry and burgesses who were not members of parliament, increasingly bypassed the privy council and in effect governed Scotland until the next parliament assembled under the terms of the Triennial Act. This first Triennial Parliament met for six sessions between June 1644 and March 1647. Further interval committees were created as deemed necessary, such as the Committee for Monies, set up in February 1646 to handle the fining of royalist ‘malignants’. The first Triennial Parliament also established a large number of session committees to deal with a wide range of financial, executive, diplomatic, and military matters. Among the most significant of these session committees were the Committee for Irish Affairs (April 1644), the Committee for the Levy (June 1644), and the Committee for the Provision of the Army (July 1645). To give added flexibility, certain committees operated as both session committees and interval committees: these included the Committee for Managing the War (January 1645), the Committee for Selling Forfeited Lands (February 1645), and the Committee for the Losses (December 1645). The Scottish parliament also created a network of shire committees, and various local committees, such as the Committee for the Burned Lands in Perthshire, or the Committee anent the Losses of the Sheriffdom of Aberdeen. These regional committees bore some resemblance to the county committees that parliament set up in England.14 Nomination to the various committees, and influence within them, became a crucial ingredient of political power in Scotland during the 1640s. Radical peers such as Argyll and Balmerino were able to ally with the representatives of the shires and boroughs to ensure that the Covenanters dominated many of the committees and eclipsed the influence of the royalist peers led by Hamilton and Lanark. Despite attempts to reassert conservative influence during the Scottish civil war of 1644–5, and again when the second Triennial Parliament met in March 1648, the radicals’ success in securing membership of many committees ensured their dominance, especially after the defeat of the royalist

DAVID L. Smith   249 (‘Engager’) invasion of England in the summer of 1648. These political trends reflected the increasing assertiveness of the gentry and burgesses against the nobility, a marked feature of Scottish parliaments during this period which John Young has called ‘the emergence of a Scottish Commons’.15 In England, meanwhile, the Long Parliament sat continuously throughout the 1640s. To handle the vast amount of wartime business, it created a series of joint committees, containing members from both the Lords and the Commons, with extensive powers conferred by ordinance. As with the Scottish interval committees, membership of these joint committees was not confined exclusively to those who sat in the Houses. The Committee of Safety, modelled on the Scottish Committee of Estates, was set up in July 1642 to direct parliament’s war effort. Following Scotland’s entry into the war under the Solemn League and Covenant of September 1643, this body was replaced in February 1644 by the Committee of Both Kingdoms, known from 1647 as the Derby House Committee. This was parliament’s main executive committee, and it gained considerable independence from the Houses. It was assisted by various other committees with more specialized functions. The Committee for the Advance of Money was created in November 1642 to raise loans and impose assessments on those of substance who refused to lend voluntarily to parliament in 1642–3. The Committee for the Sequestration of Delinquents’ Estates (March 1643) was empowered to confiscate and administer the estates of Catholics and royalists. This committee was later merged with the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents (August 1645), which allowed the less active royalists (‘delinquents’) to compound for their estates by paying a composition fine and taking an oath of loyalty (the more hardline royalists [‘malignants’] were debarred from regaining their property). As the war progressed, further committees were added by ordinance as the need arose. The Committee for Plundered Ministers was established in August 1643 to assist in finding livings for, and raising the stipends of, ministers loyal to parliament. In May 1647 the Committee for Indemnity was created to grant protection to civilian officials for things done under parliamentary ordinances, and to soldiers for actions committed in time and place of war.16 The powers conferred on these committees were sweeping and often allowed them to operate outside the common law. As the parliamentarian peer Lord Wharton observed in the summer of 1643, ‘they were not tied to a law for these were times of necessity and imminent danger’.17 Much the same was true of the network of county committees which the Houses established in the areas that they controlled. In each county there was an overarching committee and then a number of more specialized committees (for sequestrations, plundered ministers, and so on) which mirrored the structure of the central committees in London. This administrative apparatus and the parliamentarian armies were funded by two ruthlessly efficient taxes introduced by ordinance. The weekly (later monthly) assessment (February 1643) was a land tax, while the excise (July 1643) was a sales tax on certain vital commodities; subsequent ordinances extended the list of items on which it was chargeable. The burden of these taxes was extremely heavy: Kent, for example, was paying more per month in assessments by 1645–6 than it had for a whole year of ship money.

250   Parliaments and Constitutions This financial load contributed to a growing perception that parliament was acting unconstitutionally; by the mid-1640s, the Houses also seemed less and less representative. The bishops had been excluded in February 1642, and two-thirds of the lay peers sided with the king, with the result that by the second half of 1647 average attendance in the Lords had fallen to between eight and twelve. In the Commons large numbers left to join the king—over a hundred attended the Oxford parliament which he summoned in January 1644—or withdrew to their localities. Between 1645 and 1648, the Commons therefore held ‘recruiter elections’ to fill the 250 or so seats vacated by those who had departed or been debarred (‘disabled’) from sitting because of their royalism. These elections were often keenly contested by the two main groupings which by then dominated Westminster politics, the presbyterians and the independents.18 The story of the Irish parliament during these years was rather different from either the Scottish or the English parliament. After the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641, the Catholic members of both Houses were either expelled or withdrew voluntarily, leaving a small Protestant remnant that continued to sit until June 1648. Instead, the bulk of the Catholic peers and 104 former members of the Commons took their seats in a series of Confederate General Assemblies which met at Kilkenny between October 1642 and January 1649. The General Assembly was a unicameral legislative body, with an executive (the Supreme Council) subordinate to it. In effect, it was an alternative parliament: the lords temporal and spiritual were summoned by writs; the counties returned members on a forty-shilling franchise, the boroughs on the basis of their own voting systems. Interestingly, Confederate government also included a network of provincial and county councils that bore a slight resemblance to the Scottish shire committees and the English county committees.19 The Confederates consistently proclaimed their loyalty to Charles I.  Their principal goals were the immediate suspension—and in the longer term the repeal—of Poynings’ Law, and the passing of legislation to ensure the independence of the Irish parliament from the English parliament. They called for an act specifying that ‘the parliament of Ireland is a free parliament of itself, independent of and not subordinate to the parliament of England, and that the subjects of Ireland are immediately subject to your Majesty as in right of your crown’.20 These remained key Confederate demands throughout their prolonged negotiations with the king and the royalists. Charles’s defeat in the English civil war, and his surrender to the Scots in May 1646, only heightened Confederate fears that the parliament at Westminster would try to legislate for Ireland. When eventually a compromise agreement was reached in January 1649, however, it was soon rendered obsolete by the regicide and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Those events grew out of the New Model Army’s increasingly aggressive interventions against the English parliament in 1647 and 1648. During the summer of 1647, following attempts by leading presbyterians to disband the army, the long-standing links between many of the officers and the independents in both Houses became ever closer. When, in late July, London rioters, probably encouraged by the presbyterians, burst into the Commons, about fifty independents fled to the army, which reinstated them ten days later. The following year, as a second civil war broke out, many of the army officers

DAVID L. Smith   251 came to believe that Charles was a ‘man of blood’ whose guilt in shedding the blood of his subjects was an obstacle to any lasting peace settlement. By the autumn of 1648, having quashed royalist revolts in parts of England and Wales, and defeated an invading army of Scottish royalists, the officers joined with the independent minority in parliament in calling for the king to be brought to justice. The presbyterian majority, however, could still see no alternative but to negotiate with Charles, and when they persisted with the Treaty of Newport the army launched a military coup against the Commons. On 6 December 1648, Colonel Thomas Pride stood at the entrance to the House with a detachment of troops. He arrested forty-five members and secluded 186, while a further eighty-six withdrew in protest. He thus removed those members who opposed bringing Charles to trial, and left behind a radical minority of barely a hundred, which came to be known as the Rump.21 Less than a month later, on 4 January 1649, the Rump took a dramatic new constitutional step by passing three resolutions: ‘That the people are, under God, the original of all just power;… that the Commons of England in parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation; and… that whatsoever is enacted and declared for law by the Commons in parliament assembled has the force of law… although the consent and concurrence of the King and House of Lords be not had thereunto’.22 The claim of 1642 that the two Houses could legislate without the monarch’s assent thus gave way to the idea of a sovereign Commons that could rule without either the king or the Lords. This truly revolutionary principle opened the way to the trial and execution of Charles I in January 1649 and then shortly afterwards to the abolition of the monarchy and the Lords. All this was done on the authority of a small section of the English House of Commons without consulting either the Scottish or Irish parliaments. Hitherto, all three parliaments had formed part of a system of monarchical government; it remained to be seen how they would now fare in the context of a republic.

Parliaments and the Written Constitutions of the 1650s The short answer is that initially they fared very badly. One by one, the parliaments of the three kingdoms ceased to exist. In Ireland, no parliament had sat in Dublin since June 1648 and it was automatically dissolved by the king’s execution; the final General Assembly at Kilkenny likewise dissolved itself in January 1649. Thereafter, the whole Irish landscape was changed irrevocably by the Cromwellian conquest of 1649–50 and the settlement imposed on Ireland by the Rump’s Act for the Settlement of Ireland (12 August 1652). The Irish parliament’s worst fear of an English parliament legislating for Ireland was thus realized. In Scotland, the second Triennial Parliament met for seven sessions between March 1648 and June 1651.23 Appalled at the regicide, it proclaimed

252   Parliaments and Constitutions Charles II King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland in February 1649 provided he took the Covenants. Once Cromwell returned from Ireland, he invaded Scotland in July 1650 and defeated royalist forces at Dunbar on 3 September. Charles II, having taken the Covenants, was crowned at Scone on 1 January 1651, but his invasion of England the following summer was crushed by Cromwell at Worcester (3 September 1651). These events overtook the Scottish parliament, which had adjourned itself until 3 November, and on 28 October the Rump issued a declaration incorporating Scotland into a single Commonwealth with England. Parliament lasted longest in England, where the Rump survived until the spring of 1653.24 Gradually, its relationship with the army leaders deteriorated as they tried to secure a date for its dissolution, until on 20 April 1653, convinced that it was no longer ‘a Parliament for God’s people’ and that it ‘would never answer those ends which God, His people, and the whole nation expected from them’,25 Cromwell stormed down to Westminster and expelled it. In these various ways, the parliaments of all three kingdoms were thus victims of Cromwell and the New Model Army. It seemed at first as if they could not survive for long without a monarch. Soon, however, new and different parliaments were created by the very army which had destroyed the previous ones, first with Major-General Harrison’s short-lived idea of the Nominated Assembly, and then more robustly in the parliamentary constitutions of the Protectorate. The Nominated Assembly—often called Barebone’s Parliament after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone—was a unique episode in British constitutional history. More like a constituent assembly than a parliament, it was modelled on the ancient Jewish Sanhedrin and contained 140  ‘persons fearing God, and of approved fidelity and honesty’, nominated by the radical religious congregations of London, and added to by the Army Council. These 140 included six Irish representatives and five Scottish. Radical though many of the members were in their religious beliefs, the social composition of Barebone’s did not differ greatly from that of other seventeenth-century parliaments: four-fifths were gentry, forty-four had some legal training, and 119 had served as justices of the peace. It was no wonder, therefore, that the Assembly soon became bitterly divided over certain reforms, especially the abolition of tithes and of Chancery: on 12 December 1653 it voted to dissolve itself and surrendered power back to Cromwell.26 Within days of the collapse of Barebone’s, the Army Council introduced a new written constitution, the Instrument of Government, which established Cromwell as Lord Protector (16 December 1653).27 The Instrument, prepared by Major-General Lambert, was Britain’s first written constitution and it drew on earlier army terms, especially the Heads of the Proposals (1647). It was a parliamentary constitution, based on the principle that ‘supreme legislative authority’ should reside ‘in one person, and the people assembled in Parliament’. There were to be triennial parliaments which would sit for a minimum of five months. These were genuinely British parliaments, indeed the only three-kingdom parliaments in British history other than those between 1801 and 1922. They comprised 375 English members, thirty each from Scotland and Ireland, and twenty-five from Wales. The English seats were redistributed to give the counties far more representation: there were now 236 seats for the counties, 137 for boroughs, and one each for the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The county franchise was

DAVID L. Smith   253 broadened to include all those who possessed ‘any estate, real or personal’ to the capital value of £200 or more, but there was no attempt to reform the very varied borough franchises for those towns and cities which still retained parliamentary seats. Members were to be ‘persons of known integrity, fearing God, and of good conversation’; Roman Catholics, royalists, and any who had ‘advised, assisted or abetted the rebellion in Ireland’ or ‘any war against the Parliament’ since 1 January 1642 were banned from being either electors or elected. These requirements would be enforced by a Council of State, containing between thirteen and twenty-one members, chosen by parliament (and when parliament was not sitting by co-option). Cromwell was to be Lord Protector for life: future Lord Protectors would be elected by the Council of State and confirmed by parliament. In the intervals between parliaments, the Lord Protector could issue ordinances which had the force of law but which were subject to ratification by the next parliament. This constitution placed a considerable load on the relationship between the Lord Protector and parliament, a relationship that turned out to be frequently strained.28 The first Protectorate parliament met on 4 September 1654 and insisted on drawing up a parliamentary constitution which tried to specify the Protector’s powers in more detail and to enhance those of parliament. On 12 September Cromwell required members to sign a Recognition promising that they would not seek ‘to alter the Government, as it is settled in one person and a Parliament’, whereupon between fifty and eighty withdrew in protest. Those who remained pressed ahead with the parliamentary constitution, strengthening parliament’s executive as well as legislative powers at the expense of both the Council and the Lord Protector.29 Cromwell grew so frustrated that he dissolved the parliament at the first possible constitutional opportunity, after five lunar rather than five calendar months, on 22 January 1655. The second Protectorate parliament, which assembled on 17 September 1656, was more productive but still far from harmonious, even after the Council’s exclusion of around a hundred members before it opened. Many who sat in the parliament feared that Cromwell’s powers remained too open-ended; they also disliked the rule of the Major Generals, established in the summer of 1655, and ended this by defeating the militia bill in January 1657. Members then drafted another parliamentary constitution in the form of a Remonstrance which later formed the basis of the second written constitution of the Interregnum, the Humble Petition and Advice.30 In its final version (June 1657), the Humble Petition asserted the constitutional position of parliament in relation to both the Lord Protector and the Council. The Protector was to govern ‘according to the laws of these nations’, and parliament’s ‘ancient and undoubted liberties and privileges’ were to be ‘preserved and maintained’. The power to exclude members of the Commons was to rest solely with commissioners chosen by the House and not with the Council. Several features of the Humble Petition marked a step back towards more traditional patterns. The Council was once again styled the ‘Privy Council’: it was to contain up to twenty-one members, chosen by the Lord Protector and ‘approved’ by parliament. Parliament would again be bicameral: a second chamber called the ‘Other House’ was to be created, comprising between forty and seventy members nominated

254   Parliaments and Constitutions by the Lord Protector, and Cromwell welcomed this as ‘a check or balancing power’ on the Commons. In response to presbyterian fears, especially following the case of the Quaker James Nayler, greater limitations were placed on ‘liberty of conscience’ than in the Instrument. The Remonstrance had initially offered Cromwell the kingship as a further way of limiting his powers, but after agonizing for over two months he declined and decided to remain Lord Protector, with the right to choose his own successor. The Humble Petition was in many ways a much vaguer document than the Instrument of Government. Nothing was said, for example, about the franchise or the redistribution of seats, or about the status of the Scottish and Irish members. By superseding the Instrument without making any explicit provisions on these matters, the Humble Petition created areas of considerable constitutional uncertainty. When the second Protectorate parliament met for a second session on 20 January 1658, the Other House proved to be a bitter disappointment: only forty-two of the sixty-three individuals whom Cromwell summoned (and only two of the seven peers) actually attended, although that was still enough to take some of his staunchest supporters out of the Commons. The Council no longer had the power to exclude from the Commons; as a result, over twenty of those excluded in 1656 returned, among them prominent Commonwealthsmen such as Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Thomas Scott. They had always been hostile to the Protectorate and now they bitterly attacked the Other House as far too reminiscent of the old House of Lords. Exasperated, Cromwell dissolved the parliament after just two weeks, on 4 February, with the concluding words ‘let God judge between you and me’. The third and last of the Protectorate parliaments was called by Richard Cromwell and met on 27 January 1659. In the absence of any stipulations in the Humble Petition, the English and Welsh members were chosen on the same franchise and distribution of seats as in 1640, together with thirty each for Ireland and Scotland. With the Council unable to intervene, many enemies of the Protectorate, including Commonwealthsmen and crypto-royalists, were returned. When the parliament met, the Commonwealthsmen immediately challenged whether the Irish and Scottish members could legitimately attend. They also opposed recognizing Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector, and refused to acknowledge the Other House. Although Richard eventually secured the Commons’ support on all these issues, he failed to win the confidence of the army officers. Led by Fleetwood and Desborough, the officers allied with the Commonwealthsmen to force Richard to dissolve the parliament (22 April) and then resign as Lord Protector (24 May). The army, having created the Protectorate in 1653, had now destroyed it. This was the latest in a series of army interventions against parliament, following those of August 1647, December 1648, April 1653, and September 1654. It marked the end of the written constitutions of the Interregnum, and instead over the next twelve months army leaders orchestrated a series of short-lived regimes:  first the Rump was restored (May–October 1659), then the Committee of Safety was established (October–December 1659), and then finally, from February 1660, there was a return to the Long Parliament, including those members whom Pride had purged in December 1648. It was as though the regimes of the 1640s and early 1650s were being rewound at dizzying speed and in reverse order. It was the commander of the army in Scotland,

DAVID L. Smith   255 General Monck, who secured the return of the Long Parliament, and his intervention proved decisive. The Long Parliament voted to call free elections and then dissolved itself on 16 March 1660. These elections produced a pro-royalist Convention, which on 8 May declared that Charles II had been king since the moment of his father’s execution on 30 January 1649.

Parliaments and the Restoration The restoration of the king was accompanied by the return of separate parliaments in all three of his kingdoms. Each recognized Charles II as already king since January 1649: there was no sense in which he was restored to the throne or created monarch on parliamentary authority. The nature of the parliaments was once again different in each kingdom, and it is worth examining them to assess how similar they were to the parliaments that had existed in 1640. In England, the Convention which assembled on 25 April 1660 comprised a Commons elected on the same franchise and distribution of seats as in 1640, and a Lords that was complete except for the bishops. The latter returned in November 1661, following the repeal of the act that had excluded them in February 1642. Otherwise, the guiding principle of the Restoration settlement in England was that all acts that had received Charles I’s assent continued in force, while the 1200 or so ordinances passed since March 1642 on the authority of the Houses were declared null and void. This meant that the reforms of 1640–1, including the abolition of the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission and prerogative revenues such as ship money, remained in place. The only measure to be significantly modified was the Triennial Act, which was replaced in 1664 by a watereddown Act that did not require fresh elections to be held every three years but merely a session of parliament at least every third year. To compensate the king for the loss of prerogative revenues, he was granted an ordinary income estimated at £1.2 million (though it actually yielded much less than this for most of his reign) based on the customs and excise.31 If the aim in England was to return to the situation of 1641, in Scotland the clock was turned back to 1633, the year of Charles I’s coronation parliament. When parliament assembled on 1 January 1661, it consisted of seventy-five nobles, fifty-nine gentry representing thirty-one shires, and sixty-one burgesses representing sixty burghs. In March, the parliament passed a General Act of Rescissory repealing all legislation since 1633, thereby annulling not only the constitutional reforms of the 1640s but also the hated religious innovations of 1633–7. Royal prerogative powers were restored in full, including the right to appoint all officers of state and privy councillors. The clerical estate was re-established, as were the Lords of the Articles which once again enabled firm royal management of parliament. The crown was granted revenues of £480,000 Scots a year derived from customs duties and the excise on ale and beer. In marked contrast to England, nothing of the radical constitutional changes of 1640–1 survived in Scotland.32

256   Parliaments and Constitutions Ironically, England, which had learnt much from the northern kingdom in framing those reforms in the early 1640s, managed to preserve them at the Restoration in a way that Scotland did not. Ireland was the last of the three kingdoms to see parliament’s return, on 8 May 1661, and this was also the parliament whose composition was most dramatically changed since 1640. The native Irish and the Old English found themselves excluded from the Commons, which was henceforth a purely Protestant body, although Catholic peers continued to attend the Lords. The Protestant dominance of parliament ensured that no attempt was made to overturn the Cromwellian land settlement by which the proportion of Irish land owned by Catholics had fallen from 59% in 1641 to just 22% in 1660. Instead, in July 1662, the Irish parliament passed a strongly anti-Catholic Act of Settlement. The parliament continued to be controlled from London—Poynings’ Law remained in force—and it became part of the institutional machinery of the Protestant ascendancy which endured through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.33 Each parliament thus reached its own settlement with the restored monarchy, each with its own particular blend of change and continuity. As in 1640, the parliaments of the three kingdoms presented a picture of diversity, but the events of the intervening two decades had left their mark on the nature of that diversity. In England the return to 1641 preserved those royal concessions that had received Charles I’s assent; in Scotland the return to 1633 restored the crown’s prerogative powers in full and cancelled the reforms of 1640–1; and in Ireland the parliament was transformed by the sweeping land transfers of the 1640s and 1650s and the marginalization of the Catholic community. Overall, the Restoration saw a return to separate parliaments in each kingdom, based on unwritten constitutions and controlled by royal discretionary powers. The nature and extent of those powers varied from kingdom to kingdom but they remained considerable even in England, and in restoring them the architects of the Restoration settlement inadvertently restored many of the constitutional grey areas that had helped to cause the revolution in the first place. It would take another revolution in 1688–9 and the years that followed for these issues to be addressed once again and for royal discretionary powers to be decisively checked.

Conclusions Finally, it is worth closing with two observations about possible directions for future research on this subject. Firstly, the amount of relevant primary sources now electronically available is vastly greater than even a decade ago. These include the Journals of both Houses of the English parliament as well as their acts and ordinances,34 and the magnificent new edition of The Records of the Parliament of Scotland to 1707.35 Although the records of the Irish parliament have survived more patchily, another excellent new website, the 1641 Depositions, offers a huge amount of evidence for the history of Ireland in this period.36 These resources make researching the parliamentary

DAVID L. Smith   257 history of each kingdom much more convenient than ever before, and the rich material they contain will take scholars some time to absorb. We also eagerly await the History of Parliament volumes covering the period 1640–60, due to be published in 2018. With their articles on every member of the English Commons during these years, including the British parliaments of the Protectorate, and their accounts of each constituency, these will offer a wealth of further information. All these developments will make it much easier to pursue the comparative and shared history of these various institutions. Secondly, the next big question for historians to explore in this area may well concern the relationship between the parliaments and the social, political, religious, and local elites in each kingdom. Much research has rightly concentrated on how parliaments managed their relationships with successive monarchs. Their ongoing relationships with the various elites from which they were drawn, and which they represented, have—with some notable exceptions37  —generally received rather less attention. Gillian H. MacIntosh and Roland J. Tanner have recently made a perceptive point about the Scottish parliament: ‘In many respects a well-attended parliament did not represent the country, it was the country. Anybody with significant power was there—no modern institution comes close to that concentration of wealth and power in one room.’38 This is an insight that can usefully be tested for the English and Irish parliaments as well. Much research remains to be done on the relationship between these institutions and political elites: how they represented them, how their existence influenced the development of elites as a parliamentary class, and how the parliaments shaped political developments. This in turn opens up new ways of thinking about the interactions between elite politics and the life of these institutions as they faced massive political crisis. To ask such questions is to take a further step away from measuring seventeenth-century parliaments by anachronistically modern criteria of representation and towards understanding them in terms of the highly personal, often face-toface world of early modern politics and government to which they belonged. It is a world in which there is still much to explore.

Notes 1. David L. Smith, The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689 (London, 1999), chap. 1. 2. Mark A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), especially chaps. 1–4. 3. John R. Young, The Scottish Parliament, 1639–1661: A Political and Constitutional Analysis (Edinburgh, 1996), chap. 1. 4. Maija Jansson (ed.), Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America (Basingstoke, 2007), 117. 5. Jansson (ed.), Realities of Representation, 116–21; Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), chaps. 8–10. 6. Young, Scottish Parliament, chap. 2. 7. Young, Scottish Parliament, 24.

258   Parliaments and Constitutions 8. Cf. John Morrill, ‘Historical Introduction and Overview:  The Un-English Civil War’, in John R.  Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 1997), 1–17, at 12. 9. S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1906), 158–9. 10. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 164. 11. Jansson (ed.), Realities of Representation, 121. 12. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 235. 13. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (2nd edition, Cambridge, 1986), 227. 14. Young, Scottish Parliament, chaps. 3–8. 15. Young, Scottish Parliament, 327–8; John R.  Young, ‘The Scottish Parliament and the Covenanting Revolution: The Emergence of a Scottish Commons’, in Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions, 164–84. 16. Smith, Stuart Parliaments, 57, 74. 17. John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces:  The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648 (2nd edition, Harlow, 1999), 75, 197. 18. David Underdown, ‘Party Management in the Recruiter Elections, 1645–1648’, English Historical Review, 83 (1968): 235–64. 19. Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (2nd edition, Dublin, 2008). 20. Brady and Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions, 217. 21. David Underdown, Pride’s Purge:  Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971), chaps. 6–8. 22. Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 292. 23. Young, Scottish Parliament, chaps. 8–11. 24. Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974). 25. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 401. 26. Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982). 27. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 405–17. 28. Patrick Little and David L.  Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, 2007). 29. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 427–47. 30. Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 306–12; Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 447–64. 31. Smith, Stuart Parliaments, 147–50; Andrew Swatland, The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1996), chaps. 2–3. 32. Young, Scottish Parliament, chap. 13; Gillian H. MacIntosh, The Scottish Parliament under Charles II (Edinburgh, 2007), chap. 1. 33. Coleman A.  Dennehy (ed.), Restoration Ireland:  Always Settling and Never Settled (Aldershot, 2008), chap. 4. 34. . On the sources for the Westminster parliament, see Maurice F. Bond, Guide to the Records of Parliament (London, 1971). 35. . 36. . On the sources for the Irish parliament, see Dermot Englefield, The Printed Records of the Parliament of Ireland, 1613–1800 (London, 1978); and Coleman A.

DAVID L. Smith   259 Dennehy, ‘Some Manuscript Alternatives to the Printed Irish Parliamentary Journals’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 30 (2010): 129–43. 37. For two recent examples, see Jansson (ed.), Realities of Representation; Keith M. Brown and Alan R. MacDonald (eds.), The History of the Scottish Parliament, Volume 3: Parliament in Context, 1235–1707 (Edinburgh, 2010), chaps. 2–4. 38. Brown and MacDonald (eds.), History of the Scottish Parliament, Volume 3, 8.

Further Reading Brady, Ciaran and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005). Brown, Keith M. et al. (eds.), The History of the Scottish Parliament, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 2004–10). Hart, James S., Justice upon Petition: The House of Lords and the Reformation of Justice, 1621–1675 (London, 1991). Jansson, Maija (ed.), Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America (Basingstoke, 2007). Jones, Clyve (ed.), A Short History of Parliament: England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2009). Kenyon, J. P., The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (2nd edition, Cambridge, 1986). Kyle, Chris R. and Jason Peacey (eds.), Parliament at Work: Parliamentary Committees, Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002). Little, Patrick and David L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, 2007). MacDonald, Alan R., The Burghs and Parliament in Scotland, c.1550–1651 (Aldershot, 2007). Moody, T. W., F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne (eds.), A New History of Ireland, III, 1534–1691 (Oxford, 1976). Ó Siochrú, Micheál, Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (2nd edition, Dublin, 2008). Ó Siochrú, Micheál (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland, 1642–1649 (Dublin, 2001). Smith, David L., The Stuart Parliaments, 1603–1689 (London, 1999). Woolrych, Austin, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982). Worden, Blair, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974). Young, John R. (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 1997). Young, John R., The Scottish Parliament, 1639–1661:  A  Political and Constitutional Analysis (Edinburgh, 1996).

Chapter 15

The Armi e s Andrew Hopper

The military history of the civil wars has long attracted a wide public audience, despite languishing as an unfashionable, marginalized sub-discipline in universities. Many academics unhelpfully stereotype the campaign and battlefield aspects of civil war history to be sterile, peripheral, and the narrow preserve of enthusiasts intent on assessing the competence of rival commanders. Despite such condescension, civil war military history has been popularized over the last forty years by historical re-enactment. This has increased knowledge about soldiers’ clothing, equipment, drill, and ranks, but has tended to avoid the wider questions of army organization, funding, and maintenance, as well as the processes by which armies engaged in politics. Army histories need to develop broader conceptual appeal and significance. The sub-discipline of military history has yielded many new findings, but the time is now ripe for military history to be reconnected to wider debates about the causes, course, consequences, and experience of the mid-century crisis and, indeed, to the wider history of early modern England. In recent years there are encouraging signs that such a process is already underway. For example, battlefield studies are increasingly informed by topographical reconstruction, field-walking, and landscape archaeology.1 There have also been advances in studies of the funding, supply, and care of the soldiery, while the politicization of the military, in particular, the New Model Army continues to produce vibrant debate.

Military Mobilization and Popular Politics One means of widening military history is to examine the social composition and organization of armies from the bottom up. Determining the soldiers’ origins and recruitment leads us to the interaction between elite and popular allegiance. Numerous problems remain in reconstructing popular allegiance based upon patterns of military

ANDREW Hopper   261 support. Analysis of contemporary reactions to events does not necessarily uncover their motives. Outward behaviour might not accurately reflect an individual’s mindset and standpoint. Many in arms were reluctant or coerced, so historians ought to be wary of deducing political allegiance merely from military service. Rachel Weil has advanced such views further by arguing that contemporaries ‘did not adhere to a uniform or coherent understanding of allegiance’. Instead, allegiance was more about outward and visible actions, and how individuals presented themselves to those in authority. In 2008 Michael Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire developed these arguments conceptually to suggest that it ‘might be better to think in terms of the responses to particular mobilizations rather than a fixed allegiance to one of two sides’. These ‘mobilizations’ required an ongoing process of attracting support, or ‘continuous coalition-building’ against a backdrop of changing political circumstances.2 In short, maintaining armed support was just as critical as attracting it in the first place because military personnel frequently deserted or changed sides. Inspired by these developments, the process by which parliament maintained support in south-east England has recently been subjected to closer scrutiny, with stronger emphasis upon studying the external actions of individuals in contributing resources rather than attempting to unpick internal beliefs and motives.3 Yet more might still be learned about the identity of the soldiers themselves. They are worthy of closer study because they risked their lives, whether as volunteers or conscripts, to decide the civil wars’ outcome. Angela McShane has recently quipped that:  ‘Historiographically, the position of the ordinary rank and file soldier has not progressed much further than the 1644 report which listed ordinary military casualties (other than those of officers and colors) after the horses.’ Indeed, Ian Gentles once maintained that knowing much less about soldiers than their officers was ‘not a serious drawback since it was the officers who stamped the armies with their distinctive character’.4 Yet the rank and file influenced army identities too, and historians ignore them at their peril. Soldiers’ mounts, equipment, training, diet, medical care, pay, discipline, and social background influenced their fighting capacity, as well as the strategic and tactical choices available to their commanders. For example, during 1643 the strategies of both the earl of Essex and the Fairfaxes revolved around avoiding champion landscapes where the royalists could unleash their superior cavalry. Essex did so by keeping his army close to enclosed country during the Newbury campaign, while the Fairfaxes gave battle on urban landscapes at Tadcaster, Leeds, and Wakefield, where their musketry could be deployed most lethally. Short of cavalry, the Fairfaxes’ reliance upon clothworkers armed with muskets and clubs meant their success ended once they were compelled to give battle outside their urban strongholds. Closer attention to the processes of recruitment should enhance our understanding of soldier identities. Soldiers might volunteer for religious, political, adventurous, or deferential reasons. They might volunteer out of desperation and necessity, or from hopes of maintenance and survival; as Micheál Ó Siochrú has recently indicated, from 1649 even native Catholics were recruited into Cromwell’s army in Ireland, thereby participating in their own conquest.5 Recruits might be inspired, bribed, coerced, or impressed. Bonds of deference might remain an influence. In dealing with royalist

262  The Armies recruitment, historians used to rely upon Clarendon’s emphasis on magnate influence. While historians now suspect there might be more to royalist recruitment than this, Gerald Aylmer remained sceptical about the possibilities of investigating popular royalism. Nevertheless, Malcolm Wanklyn suggested the bulk of rank and file royalists in the west were artisans, while Ronald Hutton cited Ian Roy’s doctoral thesis to argue that the ‘horse regiments were always an assembly of troopers from all over the kingdom and the foot regiments were never the homogenous local units of the sort Clarendon describes’. While the processes of social mobility and promotion on merit are more usually associated with the New Model Army, P. R. Newman considered that as the war lengthened ‘lesser men entrenched themselves even more firmly as first-rate active royalists’. More recently, Lloyd Bowen has investigated the nature of such popular royalism through utilizing legal records generated in cases of seditious speech.6 The old ‘deference model’ of English and Welsh landowners raising regiments from their tenants and dependants in 1642, while remaining true in some instances, is now acknowledged to be far from universally applicable. For instance, the marquis of Hertford, the earl of Bath, and Sir William Savile failed to enforce the Commission of Array in Marlborough, South Molton, and Halifax respectively, despite the location of these towns in a countryside dominated by their family estates.7 In Yorkshire, contrary to the unsubstantiated claims of Sir Clements Markham and C. V. Wedgwood, the Fairfax family did not raise an army from their tenants. Rather, they recruited most heavily among the populous clothing towns in the centre of the West Riding which had demonstrated a conspicuous popular parliamentarian politics by spring 1643. One of their officers, the ironmaster Christopher Copley of Wadworth, recruited his troop from these clothing districts despite them being thirty miles distant from his seat. By 1646 only one of his troopers was from Wadworth. In places such as the Warwickshire Arden, north Devon, and parts of the West Riding, the recruitment of parliamentarian forces ran counter to the inclination of the majority of gentry, pushing these landowners towards a more authoritarian position.8 While major landowners shaped initial mobilizations in many places in 1642, once it became clear the war would last longer important structural changes in the nature of recruitment followed. For landowners who derived most of their income from rents, recruiting their tenants would deprive them of income. Two-way processes of negotiation emerged as leaders appealed to vested interests to attract recruits. For instance in 1642 the king raised hundreds of volunteers among Derbyshire’s lead miners by offering them exemption from lead tithe. Mark Stoyle has argued royalists continued to recruit volunteers in Cornwall en masse late into 1645 by harnessing the cause of Cornish particularism to that of preventing parliamentarian victory.9 The link between the clergy and military mobilization also merits further attention. Preaching and sermons inspired men to take up arms, while clergymen retained important roles thereafter in the moral instruction of the soldiery. Most garrisons and regiments employed a chaplain in an official capacity, but more comparative research is needed, not just on clerical allegiance, but on the specific role and functions of clergymen in the British and Irish armies of the period. There were even some occasions where

ANDREW Hopper   263 ministers were commissioned as captains of horse, such as the Warwickshire rector, Benjamin Lovell. Preaching, psalm singing, catechizing, and fasting might all strengthen a unit’s cohesion, morale, and fighting capacity.10 During 1642 the Protestation was usually tendered after the delivery of godly sermons, which were eventually intended to stimulate military recruitment. That spring at Otley in Yorkshire, parishioners were prepared for armed resistance by sermons that did not espouse rebellion but nevertheless clearly blamed the king and his advisers for the nation’s troubles. In York and Hull, John Shaw’s sermons encouraged his hearers to intervene politically to carry out God’s will, while Shaw’s preaching to Fairfax’s army at Selby encouraged the soldiers to see themselves as persecuted saints. In some places, entire congregations were directly exhorted to rise in arms and resist the king, such as those contacted through the written notes placed in Calderdale’s chapels in October 1643. Soldiers were exposed to sermons to remind them of the justice of their cause, while fiery preaching appears to have sparked some into iconoclasm.11 The Scots clergy also played a prominent role in recruitment, urging many to volunteer. At Burntisland in 1640, the minister drew up a list of recruits based on the communion roll. Likewise, in rural parishes ministers listed those eligible for service, and each Covenanter regiment contained a beneficed minister drawn from the locality of its recruitment, along with a kirk session of elders selected from the officers. In 1648, many of the kirk’s ministers hampered royalist recruitment by attacking the Engagement in their sermons, while after 1649 the clergy were again prominent in the army purges and the drive to eradicate sinfulness in the military.12 Considering that much of the royalist infantry were recruited in Wales, the treatment of the principality in the fashionable ‘three kingdoms’ historiography has been surprisingly muted. In military topics, Wales is either lumped in with England, or largely ignored. Yet historians such as Mark Stoyle and Lloyd Bowen have explained Welsh royalism as a reaction to the hostility of London’s press towards the principality. Godly parliamentarians considered Wales full of idolatry and superstition. A series of pamphlets scorned the Welsh as being motivated by a dangerous politics of subsistence. Welshness, religious backwardness, and royalism were linked in parliamentarian mentalities. Welsh royalism therefore had an ethnic dimension, seeking to preserve its cultural distinctiveness from the hostile Englishness represented by puritan Westminster and the New Model Army. However, in explaining the royalist mobilization in south Wales, Stephen Roberts has downplayed ethnicity and instead stressed the aristocratic dominance of the royalist peers the marquis of Worcester and earl of Carbery, as well as the largely unchallenged implementation of the Commission of Array. Whatever ethnic pressures may have come into play in recruitment during 1642–4, they faded thereafter as the complicated politics within south Wales made allegiance in the region especially fluid and prone to side-changing.13 Mark Stoyle has argued for similar ethnic influences in Cornwall, where the forces of ‘Cornish particularism’ ranged themselves against an Anglicizing and aggressively puritan Westminster bent on the destruction of Cornish separateness, in what he terms ‘the war of the five peoples’. For a time, the king permitted Cornish-only regiments. The

264  The Armies Cornish royalist army originated with a popular uprising that ejected the parliamentarian gentry from the county. These insurgents were later recruited into royalist regiments in substantial numbers, on multiple occasions, and as late as December 1645. Stoyle has also stressed the ethnic diversity of the armies employed within the English theatre, and that they included English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, French, Dutch, Walloons, and other Europeans. He argues that while both royalists and parliamentarians procured foreign military assistance, the king grew more dependent upon ethnic diversity in his armies, just as parliament’s armies became more exclusively English.14 In parts of the three kingdoms, ethnicity clearly became at least an additional factor in shaping the recruitment and identity of armies. In Ireland, the nobility played a greater role in recruitment. Initially, most Catholic peers were reluctant to join the rebels in 1641, but were compelled to take action by the government’s backlash and in an attempt both to save their estates and exercise control over the insurgency. Their familial networks enabled them to call on personal armies as many Catholic commanders were heads of Gaelic septs, with their company officers often being their kinsmen and followers. While the marquis of Antrim recruited heavily from native Irish in Ulster, the capacity of his Protestant counterparts was equally impressive; Jane Ohlmeyer estimates that Protestant baronial networks in Ulster raised over 10,000 men by 1643. Irish peers such as Antrim and Viscount Inchiquin were able to mobilize considerable resources, embed themselves into coalitions and change sides while carrying considerable support with them as and when necessity required. The Confederates established an administrative structure to support the war effort: county and provincial councils were established as well as a national General Assembly, in order to maintain four armies, one for each province, together with one smaller ‘running’ army. As with parliament’s regional associations in England, this structure led to rivalry between commanders and hampered strategic coordination. Another similarity with England was that impressment was utilized for recruitment, with each county required to produce quotas of men aged between eighteen and sixty. From 1643, the return of Continental veterans such as Owen Roe O’Neill did much to ensure Confederate armies became more disciplined, trained, and regularly equipped with pike and musket. Garret Barry wrote a military manual and introduced Swedish tactics to the Army of Munster, yet Confederate armies seem to have preferred sieges to battlefield engagements, while their commanders were rarely comfortable leading their ill-mounted cavalry on the field. After the defeat of the regular Confederate armies, guerrilla bands emerged, living off the land and striking from hideouts in woods and bogs. Often led by former Confederate officers, they became known to the English as Tories and continued the struggle against the Cromwellian conquest.15 This proposed blending of social and military history by giving due attention to an army’s regional origins and the identity of its soldiery will broaden our understanding of the factors influencing campaign narratives. In turn, huge networks of support, transport, and mobilization were required for an army to even reach the battlefield. This process invites historians to build upon recent advances in the understanding of how armies were funded, supplied, and maintained.

ANDREW Hopper   265

Financing the Armies All protagonists throughout the three kingdoms experienced tremendous difficulties in funding their armed forces. Despite these problems, the Scots Covenanters enjoyed remarkable success in funding their military during the 1640s, considering that for much of 1644–8 they were simultaneously maintaining armies in England, Scotland, and Ireland. From 1639, the Scots were the first to succeed in raising a national army based upon conscription. Its officers, sergeants, engineers, gunners, and muster masters were largely Scots veterans returning from Swedish service.16 Initially, local communities bore the burden of supplying and equipping the Covenanter units as the Edinburgh government lacked the resources. For example, many towns offered volunteers the freedom of the burgh and supplied their contingents with coat and conduct money to convey them to the borders. Yet gradually the government increased control in order to field a modernized, national army. The Covenanters quartered troops on their own civilians, raised forced loans and expected civilian communities to provision the soldiery. Assessments, customs duties, and excise were collected with some efficiency, with shire war committees supervising the local war effort, and the Scottish mercantile community raising loans in Zeeland. Between 1644 and 1647, the £816 089 that the earl of Leven’s Covenanter army received from Westminster enabled the Scots to intervene in England on favourable terms, and on a scale that would otherwise have proved impossible. The Scots produced a national, conscripted, standing army sustained by central government that anticipated the formation of the New Model Army by several years. The Scots in Ulster also enjoyed a measure of financial support from Westminster. Meanwhile the Scots themselves became more adept at extracting national wealth towards paying for their armies, and introduced new taxes such as the tenth penny and the twentieth penny. Laura Stewart has argued that this amounted to a fiscal revolution, which survived into the later seventeenth century despite the chaotic financing and supply of Hamilton’s Army of the Engagement in 1648.17 In Ireland, the Confederates were unable to emulate these successes. At its height, the Confederation might have gathered taxation from most of Ireland, save for the localities around Dublin, the Munster towns, and those districts of East Ulster and Derry occupied by the Scots. The Confederates ordered that every man grant a quarter of his estate towards the war effort, while they developed a financial system based on county contributions, and tried to implement an excise. Their funding also partly depended upon large sums received from the papacy, France, and Spain. Having failed to capture the arms magazine in Dublin Castle, the insurgents became heavily reliant upon munitions imported from Continental Europe. Peter Edwards has argued that their victory at Benburb in 1646 owed as much to advancements in their pay and supply as to Owen Roe O’Neill’s generalship. Despite the Confederates’ shortcomings, until 1649 the pay and supply of Protestant forces were scarcely superior. From summer 1642, Ormond’s royalists in Dublin received very little munitions from England. In Ulster, Robert Monro’s

266  The Armies campaigns were poorly supplied and this alienated the civilian population, provoking Alaisdair MacColla into joining the marquis of Montrose’s campaign in Scotland against the Covenanters. Not until Cromwell’s arrival with the New Model in August 1649 was there a decisive logistical breakthrough. Cromwell’s success was underpinned by sound financial preparation and seaborne supply which freed his men from reliance upon local resources. This conquest has been calculated at costing the English government about £3,800,000 from May 1649 to November 1656, an average of about £37,000 per month.18 In England, it has long been recognized that parliament enjoyed a critical advantage in the funding and supply of its armies because of its control of the navy and the city of London. By contrast, the royalists are depicted as having struggled, with many of their infantry armed with cudgels and pitchforks at Edgehill. Thereafter, periodic deficiencies in the supply of the king’s Oxford army were strategically decisive and do much to explain the royalist failure during the first Newbury campaign. As the war lengthened the funding of royalist armies grew more difficult because the territories under their control tended to be more war-torn and exhausted than those which supplied parliament.19 However, it does not follow that all royalist military finance was feeble or haphazard. From April 1643 the earl of Newcastle imposed upon Yorkshire what became known as the ‘Great Sesse’. It was designed to raise £30,000 per month to support his army. Subdivided into the county’s Ridings and wapentakes, it was collected by parish constables. Its surviving documentation is fragmented, but its collection continued until Newcastle’s flight into York in April 1644. This was supplemented by the raising of loans, formalized by the Yorkshire Engagement, a document popularly known as the Yorkshire Magna Charta. Lenders were promised reimbursement from the Engagement’s signatories, who pledged to repay loans according to their estates’ size. By this means £19 445 was raised very quickly. Many were forced to make contributions or sign the Engagement against their will, under threat of plundering, or to procure their release from imprisonment. So rather than maintaining his forces merely by plunder and free quarter as suggested by parliamentarian propaganda, Newcastle developed effective financial mechanisms to support his forces on a long-term basis. Furthermore, Ian Atherton’s study of the Lichfield garrison accounts has questioned the old notion that as the territory controlled by the king contracted, royalist military administration crumbled. Instead, Atherton demonstrates that in late 1645 the Lichfield royalists were better maintained and more disciplined than they had been two years earlier.20 There have also been advances in understanding the mounting, funding, and supply of the main parliamentary armies by subjecting the Commonwealth Exchequer Papers to ever closer scrutiny. Recent studies of pay warrants have done much to illuminate how the earl of Essex’s army was raised in summer 1642. It has been suggested that during the Edgehill campaign a funding crisis emerged because the localities had no representation in its constituent units. This has provoked a counter-argument relocating the crisis to after Edgehill, with the claim that parliament initially developed an effective system for paying Essex’s army. Yet with the realization that the war might prove lengthy,

ANDREW Hopper   267 parliamentarian activists from November 1642 did much to diversify their efforts into raising separate armies and organizing regional military defence.21 Here, the process of funding the armies fed directly into factional politics and infighting. Disputes, inflamed by unclear command structures, often escalated between allied commanders in conflict over honour, money, and provisions. This was aggravated by the tendency of governors of towns, castles, and fortified houses to jealously guard their commands and territorial jurisdictions, and be quick to suspect plotting and treachery among their comrades. In this way the internal politics of the regional military associations established on both sides would merit further attention, along with how they maintained support in the localities and built interests at Oxford or Westminster. For instance David Scott has demonstrated how the supply and funding of the Scots army in northern England in 1645–6 invited resentment, first among parliament’s notoriously ill-funded Yorkshire forces and then the Northern Association. As the Scots lacked an English network of civilian administrators, committees, and sequestrators, their forces were compelled into taking free quarter and raising illegal assessments to supplement what they received from Westminster. The resulting antipathy towards the Scots’ presence weakened the Northern Association forces and made them prone to mutiny, but bolstered the anti-Scots Independents at Westminster and developed for them a northern powerbase.22 This in turn translated into much-needed political support for the New Model Army from within the parliamentarian coalition. The civil wars increased the recognition that armies needed to be professional in order to succeed, with higher standards of drill, organization, equipment, discipline, funding, and supply. Whether or not the New Model was particularly novel and distinctive at its creation in 1645, it must be conceded that it was the army that eventually came closest to consistently meeting these higher standards. Its superior finances and maintenance, together with the strategic freedom enjoyed by its commanders marked it out as different. These improvements were reflected by its record of extraordinary successes not just on the battlefields at Naseby, Langport, Preston, Dunbar, and Worcester, but also in its largely prosperous conduct of siege operations throughout the three kingdoms. In addition, it developed a clout unparalleled by armies elsewhere in its ability to accelerate political change. Even before the second civil war was settled, perceptive contemporaries recognized that the New Model had been distinctively successful. Bulstrode Whitelocke cautioned the earl of Holland in June 1648 that ‘the Parlements Army was in a formed body of old soldiers prosperous in their actions, & well provided of armes & ammunition, & that it would be a desperate and rash attempt for any to imagine to make a head against them with a new body’. These advances were part of a wider, European ‘military revolution’ in which the ability of a regime to pay and supply its soldiers became more critical than ever. For example, in December 1659 George Monck’s prime advantage over John Lambert’s force marching north against him was that Monck had up to £50,000 available to pay his men, while Lambert had very little, obliging his troops to live off free quarter.23 This advantage contributed not a little to the restoration of the monarchy, and it brings us to our third key theme of military interventions in politics.

268  The Armies

Armies and Politics Merely by their existence, armies influenced politics. They constrained the terms under which peace negotiations could be made and they contributed to the factional infighting to which both sides were prone. Despite their victory in the first civil war, by 1647 parliament’s armies had grown odious to the people because of the crushing burdens imposed for their maintenance. John Morrill has suggested the cost of billeting the troops probably exceeded the cost of direct taxation. By 1647 parliament owed approximately £2,800,000 to the New Model Army, as well as its garrison forces and provincial armies under Edward Massey and Sydenham Poyntz. Faced with increasing civilian hostility and little prospect of receiving their arrears, many soldiers questioned why they remained unpaid. Some perceived a conspiracy among those MPs seeking to disband the army before arrears were settled. Despite the usual focus on the New Model, soldiers from parliament’s provincial forces were equally capable of organized political activity in response to issues of pay and indemnity. County committee men, excise officers, and sequestrators were seized and ransomed, while General Poyntz was arrested by his own soldiers.24 Yet the political intervention of parliament’s soldiers stretched far beyond their personal and professional grievances to embrace wider issues such as liberty, the franchise, and the king’s fate. As Ian Gentles has reminded us, the purge of parliament, the trial and execution of the king, and the establishment of a republic would have been unthinkable without the political interventions of the New Model Army. The exhilaration of continued victories gave them confidence to organize politically and demand outcomes from the war that recognized their sacrifices. The soldiers did not need John Lilburne to teach them political principles, as the election of representatives by mutinous soldiers was a common enough military practice elsewhere in Europe. The General Council of the Army, the Declaration of 14 June 1647, and the Vote of No Addresses all represent occasions where the New Model intervened in politics, while the strength of the soldiers’ challenge to their generals at Putney may have been underplayed. Indeed, Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon have recently argued that the first Agreement of the People presented to the General Council of the Army at Putney on 28 October 1647 was not drafted by Leveller leaders such as John Lilburne, Richard Overton, or William Walwyn, but was rather collated by John Wildman in consultation with the army’s new agents and its civilian counsellors such as Maximilian Petty. Of these, even Wildman himself was likely to have been a former trooper in the Eastern Association. So rather than seeing the Levellers as ‘infiltrating’ the army, there are now powerful arguments to envision ‘a thoroughly politicized army that was capable of thinking for itself ’.25 The concerns of parliament’s soldiers were also a crucial factor in driving the regicide, despite the hesitancy of many of the trial commissioners. Sean Kelsey has postulated that a capital sentence against Charles was far from a foregone conclusion, even once the trial was underway. He has stressed reluctance to impose the death penalty, as

ANDREW Hopper   269 well as divisions among the trial commissioners and army officers over the nature of the charges. Yet his claim that the decision to execute the king was only taken at the eleventh hour has been criticized for downplaying the implacable hostility of the army. Despite only eighteen out of fifty-nine regicides being army officers, the military played the leading role in forcing the king’s execution. Military pressure for ‘justice’ against Charles I came from petitioning units dispersed all across England, not just the New Model regiments in and around London.26 Consequently, the generals must have feared a collapse in discipline if the king was spared. The army’s political interventions thereafter remained no less critical in accelerating regime change, so much so that Austin Woolrych highlighted ‘climacterics’ around each time the army intervened against parliament in his structuring of the period. The legacy of these military interventions in 1647, 1653, and 1659 was the speed with which the army that restored Charles II was disbanded, to prevent it from meddling in politics again. Thereafter, during the later seventeenth century, standing armies were frequently equated with military tyranny and oppressive regimes. It was dark memories of the New Model, not the Army of the Covenant, or the Irish Confederacy, that were conjured when discussing the advisability of a standing army.27 This reflects that no Scottish or Irish force achieved the same degree of influence within the state that the New Model achieved in England during the 1650s. Considering the internal divisions within the Covenanting and Confederate movements, as well as the provincial-based organization of the latter’s military this is scarcely surprising. Nevertheless, despite the New Model’s retrospective pre-eminence, the soldiers of other civil war armies frequently intervened politically in ways that their masters would not have approved, suggesting that an overview of army mutinies in the war of the three kingdoms needs to be written. Political interventions from soldiers shaped the shifting coalitions and at times dictated events. For instance, Alasdair MacColla’s invasion of Argyll in 1645 and Cornish attempts to separate themselves from mainstream royalism were overtly political acts that proved highly damaging to the royalist cause. Other examples include the deployment of Roman Catholic Irish soldiers in England, an outcome that proved to be very difficult even for some bellicose royalists to stomach. Finally, the prospect of further Irish landings in 1649 had important political consequences in England. When Charles I  refused to order Ormond to desist from his preparations, he narrowed the political options available to his enemies, making regicide far more likely.28

Future Research There have been several other recent developments in the study of civil war armies. Firstly, greater attention has been paid to the historical terrain over which armies moved and fought. This has sparked a major rethinking of the traditional battlefield narratives that were once fashioned largely from textual primary sources alone.

270  The Armies Historians are now rightly more wary of speaking about a battle without having closely studied its historical terrain. There is increased recognition that walking battlefield landscapes is as important as documentary study, and that it often opens up interrogation of traditional sources from new perspectives. This approach was pioneered by P. R. Newman in his walking of Marston Moor from 1978, and advanced further by Glenn Foard’s study of Naseby in 1995. The application of written sources to landscapes and the understanding of how human land use has altered the terrain are now integral to reinterpreting civil war battlefields. Battlefield archaeology, artefact recovery projects, and shot-fall analysis have enabled major new reinterpretations of documentary sources, in particular for the decisive civil war battles of Marston Moor and Naseby. This kind of archaeology does not involve excavating trenches, but rather a disciplined use of metal detectors for mapping finds close to the surface. By mapping the recovery of battlefield debris, especially that of lead shot, historians can with more confidence link particular locations to flashpoints within a battle. Following in the footsteps of Newman and Foard, David Johnson has reconstructed the historical terrain at Adwalton Moor, built from references in the primary source accounts, antiquarian maps, battlefield visits, archaeological evidence, and landscape studies.29 This kind of collaboration between disciplines is now being advanced by the Battlefields Trust. Founded in 1991, it is pledged to ‘the presentation, interpretation and conservation of battlefield sites as educational and heritage resources’. The trust campaigns to prevent development of battlefields and improve public access. It provides interpretational panels and visitor facilities. Its website includes maps, archaeological plans, pictures, and aerial photographs of many civil war battlefield sites. Another recent development has been the increased attention paid to military care. Only the day after Edgehill, parliament recognized a duty of care to its maimed soldiers, their wives, and children. This was the first time such recognition had been made by the English state and led to considerable improvements in military hospitals, nursing, and care. The Long Parliament, Rump, and Lord Protector were bombarded with petitions for pensions and relief by their maimed soldiery, war widows, and orphans during the 1640s and 1650s, while similar petitions were made to Charles II in the 1660s by former royalists. In the provinces, justices of the peace distributed military pensions to claimants at meetings of the quarter sessions.30 Another related issue is the afterlives of the New Model’s soldiery following their disbandment at the Restoration, a topic currently being investigated by David Appleby. These issues of aftercare have begun to be explored but much further research is needed as they retain massive contemporary resonance with Western governments continuing to indulge in costly warfare during economic recession. Much more is now known about how the civil wars were fought, thanks to Barbara Donagan’s well-researched publications, which have inspired a flurry of works dedicated to explaining atrocities and the infringement of codes of conduct. There have also been advances in more specialized fields such as a recent study of how parliament developed superior structures for the gathering and dissemination of military intelligence.31 Greater attention has been paid to the practice of military side-changing, its

ANDREW Hopper   271 representations in print, and the self-fashioning of the side-changers themselves, either on paper, in the courtroom, or upon the scaffold. This cultural turn in military history raises exciting possibilities in studying how martial culture was depicted in literature, on the stage, and in the cult of honour among officers and soldiers. Iconography, banners, portraits, medals, engravings of commanders, ballads, broadsides, and propaganda woodcuts in newsbooks all offer ways in which art history, print, and material culture might contribute to developing a new, much broader military history.32 The military history of the civil wars needs to be reconnected to the fields of social, political, and cultural history, and recent works provide the means to do so. Future research might focus on the social profile, geographical origins, and recruitment of civil war armies. With advances in computer software and genealogical techniques it might become possible to document soldier identities, and kinship networks within military units in greater depth, particularly for garrison forces where both muster rolls and local parish records survive. A thorough analysis of the certificates for the sale of crown lands, which list details of soldiers’ debentures, would also illuminate the lives of those soldiers who rose through the ranks in parliament’s armies.33 The operation of provincial armies and regional military associations on both sides requires further scrutiny. How effective these associations were at mobilizing men and resources merits more attention, especially once it is considered that the personnel of the main field armies under Charles I, Rupert, Essex, and Fairfax, which have received the most attention from historians, represent only a minority of the men under arms. Such research would inform ongoing debates about the complex relationship between the centre and localities, and uncover how local rivalries impacted upon policy at Oxford and Westminster. Army histories might explain how the process of arming the people impacted upon political developments. They should also explore in what ways the social composition of armies influenced their commanders’ strategies and their soldiers’ battlefield behaviour. After all, the civil wars were decided by a combination of the mobilization of resources and the battlefield achievements of the armies. It should be remembered more often that these two factors were closely connected.

Notes 1. Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War, 1642–1646 (Harlow, 2005), 24, 279. 2. G.  E. Aylmer, ‘Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England:  4 Cross Currents:  Neutrals, Trimmers and Others’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society [TRHS], 5th series, 39 (1989): 22; David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), 186; Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006): 190; Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 233, 236. 3. Gavin Robinson, Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War:  Extracting Resources and Constructing Allegiance (Farnham, 2012).

272  The Armies 4. Angela McShane, ‘Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads’, Journal of Early Modern History, 15 (2011): 107; Ian Gentles, ‘The Civil Wars in England’, in John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998), 110. 5. Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008), 206–9. 6. G.  E. Aylmer, ‘Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England:  2 Royalist Attitudes’, TRHS, 5th series, 37 (1987):  29; Ronald Hutton, ‘Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion’, English Historical Review, 97, 382 (1982): 71, 74; P. R. Newman, ‘The Royalist Officer Corps, 1642–1660: Army Command as a Reflexion of the Social Structure’, Historical Journal [HJ] 26 (1983):  956; Lloyd Bowen, ‘Seditious Speech and Popular Royalism, 1649–60’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester, 2010), 44–66. 7. David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973), 31; Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994), 143; British Library [BL], Thomason Tract E116(9), The Last True Newes from Yorke, Nottingham, Coventry and Warwicke, 24 August–4 September (London, 1642), sig. A3r. 8. Clements R. Markham, A Life of the Great Lord Fairfax (London, 1870), 51; C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s War, 1641–1647 (London, 1958), 196; Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), chaps. 2 and 7; Andrew Hopper, ‘A Directory of Parliamentarian Allegiance in Yorkshire during the British Civil Wars’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 73 (2001): 120–2; Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (2nd edition, Basingstoke, 1998), 140. 9. Andy Wood, ‘Beyond Post Revisionism? The Civil War Allegiances of the Miners of the Derbyshire Peak Country’, HJ, 40 (1997): 23–40; Mark Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish Identities and the Early Modern British State (Exeter, 2002), 91–112. 10. Anne Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 1642–1651 (Woodbridge, 1991); Margaret Griffin, Regulating Religion and Morality in the King’s Armies, 1639–1646 (Leiden, 2004); Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), 197. 11. William Sheils, ‘Provincial Preaching on the Eve of the Civil War: Some West Riding Fast Sermons’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994), 309–10; William Sheils, ‘John Shawe and Edward Bowles: Civic Preachers at Peace and War’, in Peter Lake and Kenneth Fincham (eds.), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England:  Essays Presented to Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), 213–14; Andrew Hopper, ‘The Clubmen of the West Riding of Yorkshire during the First Civil War:  “Bradford Club-Law” ’, Northern History, 36 (2000):  68; Jacqueline Eales, ‘Provincial Preaching and Allegiance in the First English Civil War’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), 190, 196, 201, 207. 12. Edward Furgol, ‘The Civil Wars in Scotland’, in Kenyon and Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Civil Wars, 42, 46, 63, 65; Laura Stewart, ‘Military Power and the Scottish Burghs, 1625–1651’, Journal of Early Modern History, 15 (2011): 74. 13. Lloyd Bowen, ‘Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the Civil Wars and Interregnum’, Historical Research [Hist. Res.], 77 (2004):  362–4, 366; Mark Stoyle, ‘Caricaturing Cymru: Images of the Welsh in the London Press 1642–46’, in Diana Dunn

ANDREW Hopper   273 (ed.), War and Society in Medieval and Early Modern Britain (Liverpool, 2000), 162–3, 165; Stephen K. Roberts, ‘How the West was Won: Parliamentary Politics, Religion and the Military in South Wales, 1642–9’, Welsh History Review, 21 (2003): 648–9, 654. 14. Stoyle, West Britons, 59, 70–1, 75, 84, 87, 112; Mark Stoyle, ‘Sir Richard Grenville’s Creatures:  The New Cornish Tertia, 1644–46’, Cornish Studies, 4 (1996):  26–44; Mark Stoyle, ‘Afterlife of an Army: The Old Cornish Regiments, 1643–44’, Cornish Studies, 16 (2008): 26–47; Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven, 2005), 105–6, 109. 15. Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘The Baronial Context of the Irish Civil Wars’, in John Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–1649 (Basingstoke, 2009), 117, 119; Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘The Marquis of Antrim: A Stuart Turn-Kilt?’, History Today, 43 (1993): 13–18; Jane Ohlmeyer, ‘The Civil Wars in Ireland’, in Kenyon and Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Civil Wars, 77, 80–2, 86; Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars, 1641–1653’, Past and Present [P&P], 195 (2007): 64–7; Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, 1638–1651 (Oxford, 1997), 346. 16. Stewart, ‘Military Power and the Scottish Burghs’, 62; Allan I. Macinnes, ‘The “Scottish Moment”, 1638–45’, in Adamson (ed.), The English Civil War, 131. 17. Laura Stewart, ‘Fiscal Revolution and State Formation in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, Hist. Res., 84 (2011): 443–69; Laura Stewart, ‘English Funding of the Scottish Armies in England and Ireland, 1640–1648’, HJ, 52 (2009):  583, 586; Stewart, ‘Military Power and the Scottish Burghs’; Macinnes, ‘The “Scottish Moment”, 1638–45’, 152. 18. Peter Edwards, ‘Logistics and Supply’, in Kenyon and Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Civil Wars, 239, 251–2, 255, 257–8, 264–5, 269, 271; Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death: The Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars, 1638–52 (Stroud, 2000), 40; Stewart, ‘English Funding of the Scottish Armies’, 585. 19. Gentles, ‘The Civil Wars in England’, 137; Edwards, Dealing in Death, 65, 210. 20. Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, 179–84, 208; Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638–1661 (London, 2000), 25–8, 31–6; The National Archives [TNA], State Papers 19/8/248–52, 353–4; SP 19/120/72, 76, 84, 111, 120; SP 19/10/308; Ian Atherton, ‘Royalist Finances in the English Civil War: The Case of Lichfield Garrison, 1643–5’, Midland History, 33 (2008): 43–67. 21. Gavin Robinson, ‘Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642–1646’, War in History, 15 (2008):  121–40; Aaron Graham, ‘Finance, Localism and Military Representation in the Army of the Earl of Essex (June–December 1642)’, HJ, 52 (2009): 879–98; Tom Crawshaw, ‘Military Finance and the Earl of Essex’s Infantry in 1642: A Reinterpretation’, HJ, 53 (2010): 1037–48; Aaron Graham, ‘The Earl of Essex and Parliament’s Army at the Battle of Edgehill: A Reassessment’, War in History, 17 (2010): 293. 22. David Scott, ‘  “The Northern Gentlemen”, the Parliamentary Independents, and Anglo-Scottish Relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ, 42 (1999): 354–6; David Scott, ‘The Barwis Affair: Political Allegiance and the Scots during the British Civil Wars’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000):  849–50, 853, 855, 858–60; John Morrill, ‘Mutiny and Discontent in English Provincial Armies, 1645–1647’, P&P, 56 (1972): 69. For complaints of the Scots’ ill-behaviour, including the use of bagpipe-related tortures to extort money from Yorkshire civilians, see TNA, State Papers 16/513/141. 23. Ruth Spalding (ed.), The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675 (Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, 13, Oxford, 1990), 217; James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power:  War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England

274  The Armies (Stroud, 1999); F. M. S. McDonald, ‘The Timing of General George Monck’s March into England, 1 January 1660’, English Historical Review, 105 (1990): 367. 24. Morrill, ‘Mutiny and Discontent’, 52, 62, 66; Gentles, ‘The Civil Wars in England’, 147. 25. Ian Gentles, ‘The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645–9’, in Adamson (ed.), English Civil War, 175–6, 188, 191, 200; Elliot Vernon and Philip Baker, ‘What was the First Agreement of the People?’, HJ, 53 (2010): 46, 58. 26. Sean Kelsey, ‘The Death of Charles I’, HJ, 45 (2002): 727–54; Sean Kelsey, ‘The Trial of Charles I’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003):  583–616; Sean Kelsey, ‘Politics and Procedure in the Trial of Charles I’, Law and History Review, 22 (2004); Gentles, ‘The Civil Wars in England’, 154; Gentles, ‘The Politics of Fairfax’s Army, 1645–9’, 194–5; Bennett, Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, 318. 27. Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), 721; Alan Marshall, ‘ “Pax Quaeritur Bello”: The Cromwellian Military Legacy’, in Jane Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012), 116. 28. David Scott, ‘Rethinking Royalist Politics 1642–9’, in Adamson (ed.), English Civil War, 48; John Adamson, ‘The Frighted Junto: Perceptions of Ireland and the Last Attempts at Settlement with Charles I’, in Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001), 36–70. 29. P. R. Newman and P. R. Roberts, Marston Moor, 1644: The Battle of the Five Armies (Pickering, 2003), xiv–xviii; Glenn Foard, Naseby: The Decisive Campaign (Whitstable, 1995); David Johnson, Adwalton Moor, 1643: The Battle that Changed a War (Pickering, 2003). 30. Eric Gruber von Arni, Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660 (Aldershot, 2001); Geoffrey L. Hudson, ‘Negotiating for Blood Money:  War Widows and the Courts in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London, 1994), 146–69; David Appleby, ‘Unnecessary Persons? Maimed Soldiers and War Widows in Essex 1642–1662’, Essex Archaeology and History, 32 (2001): 209–21; Mark Stoyle, ‘Memories of the Maimed: The Testimony of Charles I’s Former Soldiers, 1660–1730’, History, 88 (2003): 204–26. 31. Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008); Barbara Donagan, ‘Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War’, P&P, 118 (1988): 65–95; Barbara Donagan, ‘Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994): 1137–66; Ó Siochrú, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish’, 55–86; Mark Stoyle, ‘The Road to Farndon Field: Explaining the Massacre of the Royalist Women at Naseby’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008): 895–923; John Ellis, ‘To Walk in the Dark’: Military Intelligence during the English Civil War, 1642–1646 (Stroud, 2011), 53, 165, 197. 32. For examples of the possibilities here, see Andrew Hopper, Turncoats and Renegadoes:  Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012); Alan R.  Young (ed.), The English Emblem Tradition:  3.  Emblematic Flag Devices of the English Civil Wars, 1642–1660 (Toronto, 1995); Ian Gentles, ‘The Iconography of Revolution: England 1642–1649’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution:  Essays Presented to Austin Woolrych (Cambridge, 1998), 91–113; McShane, ‘Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads’, 105–37. 33. Ian Gentles argues that by January 1648 more than 15% of the New Model Army’s officers ranked captain and above had risen from the ranks: TNA, E121, Certificates for the Sale of

ANDREW Hopper   275 Crown Lands; Ian Gentles, ‘The New Model Officer Corps in 1647: A Collective Portrait’, Social History, 22 (1997): 137, 141.

Further Reading Adamson, John (ed.), The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–1649 (Basingstoke, 2009). Carpenter, Stanley D. M. (ed.), The English Civil War (Aldershot, 2007). Donagan, Barbara, War in England 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008). Edwards, Peter, Dealing in Death:  The Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars, 1638–52 (Stroud, 2000). Foard, Glenn, Naseby: The Decisive Campaign (Whitstable, 1995). Gentles, Ian, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992). Hopper, Andrew, Turncoats and Renegadoes:  Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012). Kenyon, John and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998). Ó Siochrú, Micheál, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641– 1653’, Past and Present, 195 (2007): 55–86. Ó Siochrú, Micheál, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008). Robinson, Gavin, Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War: Extracting Resources and Constructing Allegiance (Farnham, 2012). Stoyle, Mark, Soldiers and Strangers:  An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven, 2005). Wanklyn, Malcolm, Decisive Battles of the English Civil Wars: Myth and Reality (Barnsley, 2006). Wanklyn, Malcolm, Warrior Generals: Winning the British Civil Wars (New Haven, 2010). Wanklyn, Malcolm and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War, 1642–1646: Strategy and Tactics (Harlow, 2005).

Chapter 16

The Revolu ti on i n Pri nt Jason Peacey

In January 1657, the governors of Bedlam took extraordinary precautions to isolate their most high-profile inmate from the outside world. The prisoner was ordered to be removed from ‘the society of all people’ and was searched for ‘pen, ink and paper’. The windows of his chamber were glazed and covered with ‘a close grate of wire’, boards, and bars. And the series of doors that led to his cell were given new locks and keys, which were never to be allowed in the hands of any one individual at a time. This was despite the fact that the man was desperately sick, and recovering from having been pilloried and whipped through the streets of London, from being branded with a letter B (for blasphemer), and from having had his tongue pierced with a hot poker. As it happens, such measures did not work—his nurse was reprimanded for letting him have ‘conference’ with various visitors—but they are nevertheless telling. The prisoner was James Nayler, a notorious Quaker who had narrowly avoided being sentenced to death by parliament, and these draconian measures represented a desperate attempt to prevent him from waging war against the Cromwellian regime, by means of the kinds of inflammatory pamphlets for which he had become famous.1 As such, he provides an apt way of introducing the issue with which this chapter is concerned: the print revolution. Indeed, he highlights three key dimensions of this much-discussed phenomenon, each of which needs to be considered in turn: the ‘explosion’ of cheap print after 1640; the transformation of political life that print facilitated; and the attempts to restore order and control over the print trade. This is territory that is historiographically contested, and there is little scholarly consensus regarding the impact of print and its value to scholars of the revolutionary era, but the aims of this chapter are twofold. First, it will suggest that print culture sheds light on every aspect of the civil war: on its causes, its course, and its consequences; on the issues that were at stake and the people that were involved; and on the ways by which the wars were waged and in which they were experienced. Secondly, it will argue that while there is certainly a risk of overstating the impact of print upon contemporary political culture, it nevertheless makes sense to recognize that the ‘public sphere’ was a meaningful spectre which haunted the age. Indeed, while the liberating potential of the print

JASON Peacey   277 revolution is apt to be exaggerated, it can also be demonstrated that the contested and complex history of this particularly intense phase of the print revolution left clear and indelible marks on both the political nation and public life, in ways that constitute a clear legacy of the revolutionary era.2

A Print Revolution: The Collapse of Censorship and the ‘Explosion’ of Print The most common use of the term ‘revolution’ in relation to post-1640 print culture involves the attempt to characterize extraordinary quantitative change. Put simply, historians frequently refer to an ‘explosion’ of print, something that tends to be expressed with dramatic graphs depicting the output of London’s presses across the early modern period. Such graphs are certainly striking, and they appear to be readily explicable in terms of the spikes in printing that coincided with moments of acute political tension, and with periods when authority was contested and weakened (e.g. 1641, 1647, 1659). Indeed, the most dramatic of these spikes is the one that seems the easiest to contextualize, and much has obviously been made of the link between the dramatic developments in both print culture and political affairs on the eve of the civil war. In other words, it is hard not to associate the period from the spring of 1641 to the outbreak of conflict with dramatic increases in both the willingness to publish and the freedom to do so. After all, the early reforms of the Long Parliament swept away the mechanisms associated with pre-publication censorship—with the abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission, and the removal of the licensers who were attached to Archbishop William Laud—amid fiery rhetoric about the threat to godliness and truth that had been posed by the Laudian imprimatur. More generally, of course, the return of parliament after the Personal Rule led to the outpouring of grievances and demands that had been difficult to express during the 1630s, while the religious and constitutional issues that emerged naturally led to discussion, debate, and division.3 In sum, it appears plausible to link an apparent ‘explosion’ of print with the extraordinary circumstances of the early 1640s, not least because of contemporary complaints about living in a ‘talkative’ and ‘scribbling’ age, when people were rather too quick to give vent to their opinions, no matter how inflammatory and dangerous they might be.4 The problem with this picture is not that it is wrong, but rather that it is only half-right, and the obvious problem is that it fails to acknowledge that the total output of London’s presses almost certainly did not (and could not) increase during these apparent bursts of activity. Whatever was represented by the spikes in the historian’s graph, in other words, it was not an increase in the volume of printed material that was available to consumers. As such, the ‘revolution’ of 1641 involved not so much an explosion of print as a qualitative shift in what was being produced. Given the structures of England’s print

278   The Revolution in Print trade, in other words, it is vital to recognize that the descent into civil war was marked by something both more than and less than an increase in press freedom. By doing so it is possible to focus in more detail on three interrelated changes that were much more interesting and much more important: the rise of ‘cheap print’; the development of new genres; and the emergence of new kinds of author. First, therefore, the print revolution of the early 1640s was inextricably linked to the enhanced visibility of ‘cheap’ print, in terms of pamphlets and broadsides that were short and affordable, and that tended to be fairly accessible in terms of their content, and perhaps also in terms of their availability across the country. This is not to say that cheap print was an invention of the civil wars, of course, and considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to unearthing and analysing the many ‘popular’ genres that emerged during the Tudor and early Stuart period, from educational and instructional literature to murder pamphlets, and from harmless ballads and chapbooks to primitive news reports, seditious libels and inflammatory religious and political polemics, not least those that emerged from the pens of men like Thomas Scot on issues like the ‘Spanish match’.5 However, it is to suggest that printed texts of this kind became a much more prominent feature of public discourse after the summoning of the Long Parliament, and it makes sense to characterize the ‘explosion’ of print of 1641 as involving a shift away from works of a substantial nature towards those that were relatively insubstantial, and an increase in the number of titles that appeared, rather than of the volume of print in circulation. This is certainly how many contemporaries saw it, and the period is replete with grumbling about the usurpation of scholarship by a ‘riot’ of ‘unprofitable books pamphlets, playbooks, and ballads’.6 One striking example of this phenomenon involves the balladeer, Martin Parker, who had been active since the 1620s, but whose output increased markedly in 1640 and 1641. But what is striking about Parker’s output is not just the quantity of texts that appeared but also their nature. Indeed, with texts like A True Subjects Wish (1640) Parker also symbolized another key aspect of the rise of cheap print: the topical and polemical turn within popular literature, and the domestication of political and religious debate. This particular work—a ballad to be sung to the tune of ‘O how now, Mars’—offered support for the king’s forces in their campaign against the Scottish Covenanters, and it provides evidence of the way in which the Covenanter rebellion and its apologists helped to inspire English authors and printers to produce works that addressed the most pressing issues of the day: constitutional revolution and church reform.7 Although it would be too simplistic to suggest that 1640 marked a watershed in cheap print—between a world of innocent popular piety and merry tales and one dominated by controversy and polemic—there is certainly mileage in suggesting that political and religious tracts loomed considerably larger on the print horizon as war approached. Indeed, it is also true that it became considerably less risky to publish what James I would have considered ‘lavish and licentious’ discourse on topics that had previously been thought unfit for popular consumption. And it became much easier to produce such material on presses based in England, rather than to engage in surreptitious printing in the Low Countries, or clandestine publishing from a few underground presses in the capital. For

JASON Peacey   279 polemicists like William Prynne and Henry Parker, in other words, the times demanded new kinds of text, on issues like episcopacy and the royal prerogative, and the political circumstances made such interventions much more feasible.8 A second and intimately related dimension to the qualitative print revolution of the early 1640s involved new kinds of text that undermined the arcana imperii in rather different ways. This involved varieties of political ‘news’, and yet another sense in which the revolutionary decades witnessed the domestication of political discourse. News, of course, had been a staple of cheap print since the sixteenth century, and more obviously since the 1620s. Indeed, the outbreak of the Thirty Years War had encouraged the widespread importation of European gazettes and ‘corantos’ for an educated and elite clientele—such as the Coke and Harley families—and then the development of a native news industry, led by characters like Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne. However, while contemporaries undoubtedly became more or less familiar with news pamphlets (occasional) and primitive newsbooks (serial) by 1640, successive governments ensured that people had little opportunity to read about domestic affairs rather than Continental conflicts. Home-grown news stories, in other words, remained confined to scribal newsletters, and more or less the preserve of wealthy members of the gentry, barring occasional coverage of episodes like the assassination of the duke of Buckingham or the murder of Doctor Lambe.9 This changed rapidly and dramatically in the early 1640s, as a result of the return of parliament and of events in Scotland and Ireland. In part this involved stationers feeding (and perhaps fuelling) demand for news regarding the Bishops’ Wars and the Irish Rebellion, the latter of which involved literally hundreds of short, lurid, and populist texts regarding the atrocities committed against English Protestant settlers, as well as reports on the progress of the English military campaign to restore royal authority.10 When England became a theatre of war, of course, reporters and their publishers turned their attention to skirmishes and battles on English soil, but a much more important phenomenon involved the development of English ‘diurnalls’— such as Diurnall Occurrences and the Perfect Diurnall—that fed English readers with regular and affordable doses of domestic news. This was a development of huge significance, the popularity of which is evident from the fact that the Perfect Diurnall spawned numerous imitators, many of which were little more than pirated editions. In the last week of July 1642, for example, no less than five different newspapers were available that bore this particular title. These represent a bewildering maze for the modern historian, but they attest to the contemporary appetite for ‘current affairs’. Indeed, the number of different newspaper titles quickly ballooned—with as many as twenty different titles being available each week by the mid-1640s—in order to cater for every conceivable taste. Some supported the royalists (Mercurius Aulicus), while others favoured the parliamentarians (Mercurius Civicus), and some were extremely radical (The Moderate), and while some were dry and serious (Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer), others were jocular and even semi-pornographic (Mercurius Melancholicus). The ‘news revolution’ of the early 1640s thus offers striking evidence about how cultural resources were transferred from other areas and other genres, as private news ‘agents’ like Daniel Border and John Dillingham turned their hand to printed

280   The Revolution in Print journalism, and as the publishers of ballads diversified into newsbooks.11 But it also provides important clues regarding a third qualitative shift in print culture: the emergence of new kinds of author and new publishing practices. Here the key changes involved a much greater prominence for ‘professional’ authors who lived by their pens—a hitherto rare phenomenon, although one that was not entirely unknown—and for writers whose backgrounds were somewhat humble. The civil wars, in other words, witnessed the rise, if not necessarily the invention, of ‘Grub Street’, a real place that became associated with the seedier side of print culture, and a term that increasingly conjured images of impecunious hacks and uncouth publishing practices. From 1641 onwards, therefore, stories abounded about ‘pettyfogging scribes’ and ‘pot-poets’, who composed scandalous texts and invented fanciful news stories, and who then sold them for a few shillings to ruthless stationers. The latter tried to pass off such ‘bum fodder’ as ‘true’ relations, and they were accused of undermining the credibility of the print medium, and any number of individuals were arrested, hauled before the authorities, and imprisoned.12 This is not to say that such characters and practices predominated. There was almost certainly an element of scaremongering in contemporary rhetoric, and it was certainly the case that many of the most prominent polemicists and journalists of the age—from Parker to Prynne and from Peter Heylyn to Griffith Williams—hailed from gentry stock and had other sources of income, whether as clerics and lawyers or as ‘privados’ and ‘civil servants’. Nevertheless, some well-bred authors began to make a good living from print—the most obvious case being Marchamont Nedham—and there are also fascinating cases of humble individuals rising to prominence through populist prose and professional guile. Here scholars have rightly dwelt on characters like John Taylor the Thames bargeman and Henry Walker the London ironmonger. This is not just because their many abusive pamphlets represented some of the earliest signs of the cheap print revolution, but also because Walker went on to become one of the pre-eminent journalists of the age.13 However, the transformation of authorship also involved the way in which the circumstances of civil war and revolution—contested authority and intellectual creativity—led to the emergence of men and women who seized the opportunity to express radical ideas of all kinds, whether as hardline royalists, political radicals, or religious sectarians. Many of these are now entirely familiar to scholars and students alike. They included future Levellers, whose polemical careers began with membership of dissident congregations and involvement with underground presses, and they also included a plethora of soldiers and merchants from across the land, as well as London radicals like Katherine and Samuel Chidley. And of course they also included the troublesome Quaker, James Nayler, as well as any number of his associates.14 Levellers like Lilburne and Quakers like Nayler, not to mention ‘Ranters’ like Thomas Tany, sent shivers through sizeable sections of the political elite, because of both their ideas and their humble status. Indeed, for conservatives like Thomas Edwards they offered living proof of what happened when order, hierarchy, and deference were challenged by upstart men and women who had no legitimate role in public life.15 However, what also caused concern was the blatant way in which they addressed humble citizens—the ‘clubs and clouted shoes’—and the danger that they might ‘stir up sedition’

JASON Peacey   281 among the ‘witless multitude’. To contemporaries, in other words, the ‘print revolution’ was thought to be intimately connected to novel political practices, and to an entirely new political ‘style’.16

A Revolution by Print: From the Protestation to the Regicide Much less common than the idea of a print revolution involving new freedoms, new genres, and new kinds of author is analysis of the link between print culture and the political revolution of the 1640s. Nevertheless, as scholars are beginning to recognize, print culture was intimately linked to new kinds of political behaviour, and to new kinds of relationship between political regimes and members of the wider public. The aim of this section, therefore, is to examine new practices, new ways of engaging with the people, and new kinds of interaction between citizens and their rulers in the conditions of civil war, from the Protestation of 1641 to the trial of the king in 1649. Central here will be the idea that the revolution was achieved in no small part by printed means. Political machinations, in other words, came to involve every branch of an expanded political nation—from ‘hedgers at the hedges’ to ‘plowmen at the plough’ and ‘threshers in the barns’, and from Nehemiah Wallington the woodturner to Thomas Rugg the barber—as public opinion and the ‘public sphere’ became conjurable spectres, if not necessarily demonstrable phenomena.17 The most obvious way in which historians have thought about the novel political style of the 1640s involves the idea of enhanced and intensified public debate. Previously, debates had either been restrained—as with the deliberate attempts to ensure that religious disputations were restricted to private and oral exchanges—or else contained, not least through William Laud’s efforts to discourage printed exchanges which might cause controversies to be ‘further stirred’. By the early 1640s, however, debates were much more obviously taking place in public, in print, and in a much less restrained fashion, and in relation to both the religious and political debates of the age. One way in which this became evident involved the tendency for formal religious disputations to spill over into print, but a more common pattern involved controversial pamphlets provoking printed responses which rapidly escalated into prolonged exchanges that drew in a wider group of authors.18 This pattern emerged fairly quickly—as with the debate between Joseph Hall and ‘Smectymnuus’ or between Henry Ferne and Charles Herle—and it was one that became a firmly entrenched feature of civil war culture. This was true not just in terms of debates between spokesmen for royalism and parliamentarianism, but also in terms of arguments between different parliamentarian factions, on contentious issues like church reform or the merits and demerits of the republic’s Engagement. However, this sense that political culture became notably dialogic was evident at the scurrilous as well as the serious end of the print spectrum—as with the

282   The Revolution in Print exchanges between Walker and Taylor—and it became absolutely central to civil war journalism. This was certainly evident in terms of news pamphlets, where readers were frequently confronted with contradictory accounts of particular battles—all of which were described as ‘true’—and it was also a central feature of early newsbooks, some of which were designed with the more or less express purpose of providing rapid rebuttals to the claims made by political rivals (e.g. Mercurius Britanicus). The danger, and one that was apparent to contemporaries as well as recent historians, was that debates would become increasingly acrimonious, and that readers would despair about the possibility of discerning the truth.19 Increasingly, however, historians have become fascinated by the ways in which print became centrally important not just to the dynamics of public debate but also to the processes by which elites engaged with the public in a much more direct and purposeful fashion. It was central, in other words, to new ways of mobilizing, enlisting popular support, and expressing public opinion, all of which became central to the political culture of the revolutionary era, and none of which could be done very readily without varieties of print media. Of course, it had long been common for regimes to address their citizens, and for individual politicians to engage in the dark arts of ‘popularity’, by courting and demonstrating public support, but this is another area where the early 1640s witnessed considerable change.20 Indeed, as with so many other aspects of the print revolution this became dramatically apparent long before war broke out, and can be demonstrated with three of the most important phenomena of 1641: the Protestation, mass petitioning, and the Grand Remonstrance. The Protestation (May 1641), which was issued in the context of mounting political unrest and the fear of armed conflict, involved an oath of loyalty—nominally to the king and the established church, but effectively a proto-parliamentarian test of allegiance—and print technology permitted it to be circulated aggressively in print in order to reach into every corner of the political nation, both literally and metaphorically, and in order to enlist support and provide documentary evidence about the loyalty of even the most humble citizens. It offered a remarkable demonstration of inclusivity, and it can be shown to have been used as a totemic device in street politics. It was also treated as an empowering text that sanctioned the expression of popular opinions, and indeed fairly dramatic forms of popular political action, including religious iconoclasm.21 This sense that citizens were being mobilized in novel ways also became evident from the emergence of mass petitioning, and if the Protestation involved creating and testing popular allegiance then the petitioning campaigns undertaken both locally and nationally in the early 1640s revealed a determination to invoke mass support. What is striking about the kind of petitioning that became common in 1641, therefore, was that print provided a valuable means of demonstrating popular views, and that this was done in ways which tended to prioritize and validate numerical strength rather than social status. In other words, it was deemed to be more important to show that petitions had secured thousands of signatures—even if these came from humble citizens—than to prove that they were representative of the views of local elites.22 The novelty of such tactics is evident

JASON Peacey   283 from the controversy that they generated, and it was fairly common to find conservatives expressing disdain for tactics that sought to ‘fill paper with names’, and that sought to valorize the opinions of ‘mean men’.23 Finally, with the Grand Remonstrance (November 1641) parliament made an equally blatant and controversial appeal for popular support. The novelty here was that a text which offered a detailed indictment of Caroline policies, as well as a detailed list of political and religious demands, was ordered to be printed for public consumption rather than merely presented to the king, and Sir Edward Dering complained that ‘I did not dream that we should remonstrate downward, tell stories to the people, and talk of the king as of a third person.’24 These three episodes not only set the tone for civil war political culture—from the ‘paper war’ between king and parliament in 1642, to the political campaigning over the Solemn League and Covenant and religious reform later in the decade—but also demonstrated clear political awareness that popular support could not be taken for granted, and that persuasion was a political necessity. They also reveal awareness not just that the views of ordinary citizens needed be moulded, but also that popular sentiment mattered to the political elite, and that it needed to be taken into account much more obviously than had been true in the past. What is implicit in these three episodes is that print facilitated the enlargement of the political nation, both socially and geographically. This is an idea that has traditionally met with unwarranted scepticism from historians, and there is plentiful evidence that the transformation of political culture which accompanied the print revolution and the civil wars was experienced far beyond the capital, and in both urban and rural settings. In part this reflected a quiet revolution in the structures of the book trade—involving dramatic increases in the number of retail outlets that made print available, and a demonstrable shift in their stock from scholarly and educational texts to works containing news and topical debate—but it also involved novel habits and practices of consumption. Thus, in addition to the fact that cheap political texts became much more readily available in bookshops across the land, as well as from countless mercers and cobblers in provincial towns, they also started to fill the pedlar’s pack, and any number of provincial citizens struck deals with local carriers in order to ensure regular supplies of up-to-the-minute information. Thus, while pamphlets and newsbooks continued to be circulated through gentry networks, and to the elite through the services of London stationers, they also became accessible to much more humble citizens, effectively by subscription. As such, stories abound of printed texts provoking conversations and debates on street corners and in shop doorways, and of the latest news being read to artisans and tradesmen in provincial inns and alehouses, and then being transmitted orally among friends and acquaintances, quite literally on the street. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that printed texts—from proclamations and declarations to newsbooks and pamphlets—became a ubiquitous feature of daily life even in the most remote corners of the land. And it seems clear that this also meant Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, where the impact of the print revolution has received much less attention. Quite apart from the innovative techniques for exploiting print that were developed by the Covenanters in the late 1630s, and the

284   The Revolution in Print role of English troops as ‘carriers’ of both texts and ideas, contemporary correspondence clearly reveals prevalent assumptions that local residents—in both town and country—had ready access to the product of London’s presses. Thus, while it would be wrong to suggest that the print revolution made exactly the same impact on the masses as it did on the elite, on rural areas as it did on towns, and on the provinces as it did on London, it would be equally unwise to deny that printed texts had considerable social and geographical reach, and that such material helped to foster a genuinely national culture of news and comment. However, if the emergence of a political culture that was dialogic and politically integrative has begun to generate scholarly interest, and can be shown to have transformed the lives of people across the three kingdoms, then other changes to conventional political practice have received much less attention. Not the least of these is a dramatic increase in political transparency, a somewhat neglected aspect of the arcana imperii, and one that was profoundly affected by the print revolution. Indeed, the period after 1641 witnessed an unsteady but discernible process whereby political secrecy was undermined, either willingly or by means of aggressive tactics on the part of politicians and the press, or more commonly as a result of a complex mixture of factors and actors. One fairly obvious way in which this occurred involved parliamentary news, including detailed evidence about proceedings and processes at Westminster. This was indicative of a trend whereby information that had traditionally been regarded as secret, or at least ‘privileged’, became readily available, and one of its most dramatic manifestations involved the publication of speeches by many of the most prominent MPs and peers. Between 1640 and 1642, for example, more than fifty different pamphlets purported to contain speeches by John Pym, and although many of these were duplicate texts, and even forgeries, they are indicative of the enthusiasm with which parliamentary news was consumed, and the regularity with which it was supplied by entrepreneurial stationers. This was both winked at and frowned upon by MPs, depending on the circumstances in which it was done, and it can be shown to have made a fairly remarkable impact on the ways in which contemporaries followed parliamentary affairs, and indeed monitored the activities of their MPs.25 Such material represented merely a fraction of the evidence that pamphleteers and journalists made available about parliamentary affairs, and it was also representative of the way in which the print revolution facilitated the individualization of political life. This meant providing details not just about political processes and proceedings, but also about specific individuals within the ruling elite, in terms of their characters, their ideas, and their performance. On many occasions this was done consciously and willingly by public figures, not least in order to defend or boost their reputations, and to draw attention to their opinions and their service, but it could also be done in a more intrusive fashion. Perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon involved the king himself, who became subject to unprecedented public scrutiny as a result of the capture of his private letters, most famously with the publication of the King’s Cabinet Opened (1645). Although not everyone believed that these letters were genuine, the overwhelming impression was that the revelations which they contained

JASON Peacey   285 proved highly damaging to Charles’s reputation and political credibility.26 However, this episode represented merely the most prominent example of a much broader trend, and it is legitimate to talk about the emergence of muckraking journalism in the 1640s, and about the origins of the political blacklist. In 1648, for example, royalists provided readers with detailed evidence about the perquisites and offices that were received and held by a group of prominent MPs, while aggressive journalists like Marchamont Nedham more than amply fulfilled their promises to use papers like Britanicus and Pragmaticus to expose ‘the virtues and deserts of the best, the treachery, malignity, cavalierism of the worst’.27 The fourth and perhaps least understood transformation in political practice that can be associated with the print revolution involves the potential that was created for public participation in political life. Here the central idea is that the print media proved susceptible to being appropriated by members of the public, not just in order to express their views as actors in a ‘public sphere’ of discussion and debate, but also as contributors to political deliberations. This could be done individually as well as collectively, and it could involve the use of print as a tool for petitioning and lobbying, or as a means of organizing support, and it could also involve placing pressure on specific MPs. One particularly striking instance involved presbyterian activists in London creating hundreds of copies of printed petitions for distribution across the city, in the hope of encouraging supporters to ‘get hands’, and some of these even left spaces for the addition of signatures and for the insertion of the name of the parish from which they came. In 1647, meanwhile, activists within the army used printed texts in an aggressive fashion to heap obloquy on presbyterian MPs in the House of Commons, ahead of the impeachment of the eleven members. Indeed, during the tumultuous events of the 1640s it even proved possible to use print as a tool in street politics, in order to organize protesting crowds, as supporters of peace attempted to do with notices aimed at London apprentices in January 1643. Ultimately, where this led was to the innovative and imaginative use of print by more or less radical political and religious movements. London baptists used printed notices in order to encourage mass petitioning in every parish of London as early as 1643, and the Levellers famously employed similar tactics in the late 1640s, by producing literally thousands of incendiary texts for distribution across the south of England, and by using printed texts as an essential ingredient in the campaign to enlist support for the Agreement of the People.28 The latter was literally intended to be signed by ordinary citizens, as part of the process of placing pressure on parliament and reforming the political system. In these cases, in other words, printed texts were absolutely central to the process by which radical movements not only operated but also came into being, something that has been made palpably clear for the Quakers, a movement whose missionary zeal may have come to nothing without the creation and distribution of vast quantities of printed material.29 What such examples provide is evidence with which to substantiate the fears expressed by any number of conservative contemporaries, namely that print was integral to the process by which ordinary citizens had ‘invaded the sacred reins of

286   The Revolution in Print government’, that they had become ‘statesmen’, and that the period witnessed the ‘kinging of the multitude’ and ‘a sea of democracy’.30 Indeed, this sense that print facilitated new ideas and practices regarding political participation, representation, and accountability emerges extremely clearly during the trial of Charles I in 1649, which reveals much more than merely the existence of an intense debate about the legitimacy of the proceedings. The idea of putting the king on trial was promoted heavily in print, not least by the army, whose famous Remonstrance was supplemented by a vigorous lobbying campaign, in which printed petitions not only reflected sentiments within the ranks but also became devices for inspiring further agitation. Other texts, meanwhile, provided readers with detailed accounts of parliamentary politics in the weeks before the trial, including details about the MPs who were removed at Pride’s Purge, and the texts of speeches like those of William Prynne, the latter of which was read communally by at least one group of interested onlookers in Essex. More particularly, the thorough—effectively verbatim—accounts of the trial that appeared in both pamphlets and newspapers as events unfolded provided readers with an unprecedentedly detailed account of the performance of the prosecutors, the defendant, and the judges. There are grounds, in other words, for arguing that the events surrounding the king’s trial represented the acme of the print revolution.31

A Restorative Revolution: Censorship, Propaganda, and the Search for Order However, the period surrounding the regicide also reveals other things about contemporary print culture, from the imprisonment of seditious pamphleteers like John Lilburne to the hiring of salaried writers like John Milton and John Hall, and the passage of a new Act for regulating the press, which resulted in the silencing of a range of royalist, radical, and more or less unreliable journalists (September 1649).32 Such evidence is indicative of determination to tame the press, and of a rather different kind of revolution. For many contemporaries in the seventeenth century, of course, the term revolution had restorative rather than transformative connotations, and as such there are also grounds for exploring a revolution in print which brought about political control rather than merely political liberation. This sense of the need to impose order on the print trade was most famously expressed after 1660 by Sir Roger L’Estrange, who argued that the press had made people ‘too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors, too pragmatical and censorious’, and that it had given them ‘not only an itch but a kind of colourable right and license to be meddling with the government’. Indeed, he insisted that ‘the people neither have had, nor ever can have, nor ought to have, any right, power of faculty of government’; that ‘the subject’s part is resignation and obedience’; and that it was necessary to instil ‘dutiful and honest principles into the common people’. Indeed, he became notorious for arguing that ‘’tis the press that has made ’em mad, and

JASON Peacey   287 the press that must set ’em right again’.33 However, L’Estrange’s tactics for controlling the press can only be understood in the context of policies that emerged from 1641 onwards, and most obviously during the republic and Protectorate. The punishment of Nayler, in other words, needs to be contextualized in terms of a protracted and complex process for regaining control over print culture. First, as Henry Walker found to his cost on more than one occasion in the early 1640s, the Long Parliament was perfectly willing to punish authors and printers who were thought to have stepped out of line, and he repeatedly found himself in trouble for his printed antics, not least for throwing an inflammatory tract into the king’s coach in January 1642. Indeed, the 1640s provide plentiful evidence that parliamentarians were determined to make an example of malefactors ‘for a terror to the rest’, and as such public book burnings quickly became a fairly common sight in London. In the spring of 1643, indeed, the Committee of Examinations ordered searches to be made for illicit presses, which were to be destroyed and their owners imprisoned, and it was also ordered that seditious books ought to be seized from bookshops and bookstalls. In addition, powers were granted to the Committee for Sequestrations to confiscate the estates of delinquent printers, and the authorities were also able to rely upon the zeal of the Stationers’ Company, whose beadle, Joseph Hunscott, proved to be particularly active in the pursuit of offenders. Thus, the fact that the 1640s witnessed pleas for freedom of the press—from men like Henry Robinson, John Bachilor, and Gilbert Mabbott—ought to be seen as evidence that the collapse of press control, about which so much has been said, was never more than partial. Indeed, rather too much has probably been made of the tolerance of commentators like John Milton, whose Areopagitica—‘a speech… for the liberty of unlicensed printing’—may not only have been ignored by most readers at the time, but also recognized clear limitations to the kinds of freedom that were thought to be desirable.34 Mention of Milton and his famous pamphlet, of course, raises another important issue relating to the revolution that occurred in relation to press freedom:  licensing and pre-publication censorship. Here it is rather too easy for historians to dwell on the removal of the Laudian system in 1641, and to associate this with the end of censorship, and what needs to be recognized is that the principal aim of many MPs was to challenge the substance of Caroline licensing rather than its form. The problem, as Sir Edward Dering explained, was that it led to a situation in which ‘truth is suppressed’, while ‘Popish pamphlets fly abroad, cum privilegio’. Indeed, a somewhat neglected aspect of print culture in the 1640s—beginning as early as 1641—was fairly determined experimentation with new methods for controlling the output of London’s presses. In part this meant the establishment of a parliamentary licensing committee, under Dering’s chairmanship, in order to approve books and pamphlets for publication, not least by authors who had been victimized by the Laudian regime. More obviously, however, it meant the appointment of new licensers, mostly from within the ranks of the (puritan) clergy, and the implementation of a new ordinance relating to press control (June 1643), as well as further similar measures in subsequent years, both during the late 1640s and the Rump parliament.35

288   The Revolution in Print With both of these aspects of censorship, however, it is important to recognize that the dynamic of press control during the 1640s was highly complex, and that the trajectory was far from smooth. This is partly because the press became a political battleground that was contested between rival groups within the parliamentarian cause, with licensing as a powerful weapon in factional tussles. There were, therefore, presbyterian licensers as well as independent licensers—who approved very different kinds of text, and who sometimes tussled for control of particular newspapers—as well as a few licensers who appear not to have believed in licensing at all. These included one John Milton, who served briefly as a licenser of republican newspapers in the early 1650s. This all suggests that pre-publication censorship was about more than merely press control, and among the factors that underpinned the new press regime in the 1640s and 1650s was the attempt to protect the guild of stationers as well as the interests of politicians. Indeed, the Stationers’ Company remained an active partner in the enforcement of press control for most of the 1640s. That the company was eventually side-lined after 1649 is indicative not just of the fact that their presbyterian bias troubled the independents and the army, but also of a second crucial dimension of official policy during the revolutionary era: the growing power of the centralized state. After 1649, therefore, every aspect of press control, including the bulk of licensing, was undertaken by men who were civil servants, or else clerics who held official positions within the Council of State or Cromwellian regime.36 Thirdly, it makes sense to recognize not just that press policy was sometimes reactive rather than systematic, but also that one of the government’s central aims was to ‘police’ the press rather than to silence critics entirely. It has recently been argued that this may also have been the goal of the early Stuart regimes, and that a policy of regulating the boundaries of acceptable discourse might make more sense of their decisions than the possibility that the government was either repressive or ineffective, but it much more clearly influenced the thinking of MPs in the 1640s.37 The result was that concerted efforts were made to monitor London’s presses, and to keep them under surveillance, but not necessarily to take action against every seditious pamphlet about which they became aware, even when they knew exactly who was responsible. The results appeared to involve inconsistent enforcement, but this almost certainly represented an attempt to gather information in order to be able to take decisive action when circumstances required that this should be done. Fourthly, and related, it also makes sense to argue that part of the strategy of successive regimes during the civil wars and Interregnum involved the attempt to formalize what was and was not acceptable in terms of printing and publishing. This meant ensuring that blasphemy and sedition were punished much more consistently than mere radicalism and royalism, and it also meant navigating a middle-way between the Scylla of oppressive official secrecy and the Charybdis of complete political transparency. In other words, it is important neither to deny that attempts were made to tame the press after 1641 nor to characterize this as involving a simple return to an earlier model of regulation and control. Indeed, this is particularly clear from the fact that the period witnessed fairly innovative attempts to combine censorship and licensing with the

JASON Peacey   289 subtle arts of ‘spin’ and ‘propaganda’. Such terms are obviously anachronistic, and yet the concepts were clearly understood by contemporaries, and one of the hallmarks of the period was the emergence of fairly subtle methods for exerting a positive influence over the content of the press, and for deploying print in a tactical fashion. Here the devices that were used ranged from the traditional—such as official proclamations and declarations, which were produced in vast quantities and circulated zealously—to the novel and the experimental. Any number of authors and stationers worked with the political authorities in more or less clandestine ways, and print was regularly used not just to rally support and secure allegiance but also to convey official messages to diverse audiences, and to fly kites for controversial policies. Indeed, this is another area where enhanced subtlety and sophistication was accompanied by the intensification of state power, and the Interregnum witnessed an increasingly professionalized, bureaucratized, and wellfunded machinery for the production of various kinds of propaganda.38 In other words, the 1640s and 1650s witnessed what might be thought of as a restorative revolution, in the sense that it is possible to reconstruct a concerted if complex and piecemeal campaign to ensure that some kind of order was restored to the print trade after the turmoil of 1641. However, close scrutiny reveals that this involved something other than a straightforward turning back of the political clocks, in order to reinvent a system with which Laud and Charles I would have been familiar. Press restraint after 1641 was qualitatively different to the policies of earlier regimes, and it was combined much more obviously with a determination to engage with the people through persuasion and the black arts of propaganda. Indeed, the result was an integrated and highly centralized system, in which surveillance, censorship, and punishment, as well as intelligence gathering, were overseen by the Council of State, and by men like John Thurloe. The most obvious symbol of this new approach to the press and print culture involved the measures taken in the summer of 1655, which ensured that the government effectively secured a press monopoly, at least in terms of the news industry, with two more or less closely controlled official newspapers under the editorship of a salaried journalist, Marchamont Nedham.39 That this system did not survive the collapse of the Protectorate in 1659—when the return of the Rump was accompanied by new kinds of freedom and particularly intense public debates—is less important than the fact that it provided a very clear and attractive model for successive generations, and for men like Sir Roger L’Estrange. To the extent that the mid-seventeenth century witnessed a story of renewed official control over the print trades, therefore, it was one which began much earlier than 1660, and which occurred in an incomplete and highly complex fashion.

Conclusion: The Legacy of Revolution That the story of print culture after the Restoration is one of both continuity and change provides a suitable way of thinking about the legacy of the print revolution. What has become clear is that the term ‘revolution’ must here be used in more than one way. In

290   The Revolution in Print part the revolution involved a qualitative shift in the output of the press, an explosion of cheap print that brought news and comment to a much wider audience, and a transformation of the conditions in which authors and stationers worked, and in the processes by which their texts were produced. This print revolution had a profound impact on who was affected by the civil wars and how the revolution was experienced by ordinary citizens. But the revolution also had a fairly profound impact on the practice of politics, and was deeply implicated in the political upheavals and revolutions of the period. It played a part in the collapse of royal authority and the constitutional experimentation of the civil wars and Interregnum, and it was also integral to new kinds of relationship between governors and governed, and to new kinds of interaction between the political elite and the people. And while it would be naive to suggest that print caused these revolutionary changes, it would also be foolish to overlook the fact that such changes would not have happened without the print revolution. In this sense the print revolution both reflected, facilitated, and helped to shape the political revolution. And integral to this political revolution were impulses which ensured that print became a political tool for the elite as a well as a weapon of the weak, and there was no clearer indication of the potency of print culture than that successive regimes sought to tame and exploit a range of popular genres—most especially the newspapers—and to restore order to the print trade. The upshot was that the revolutionary decades witnessed novel manifestations of a perennial truth about the media: that there was a complex interplay between the forces of ‘liberation’ and the forces of ‘authority’. Contemporaries, in other words, encountered different kinds of print revolution during the civil wars and Interregnum, which had different effects, and which occurred simultaneously. As such, the legacy of the revolution in print is far from straightforward. Nevertheless, what seems clear is that civil war print culture helped to ensure that the period witnessed more or less permanent changes in terms of the expansion of the political nation, the vulgarization of politics and information, and the emergence of something resembling a shared culture of news and comment. This meant that contemporaries both inside and outwith the political elite began to question accepted ideas and practices relating to participation, transparency, representation, and accountability, and although the debates that emerged did not produce consensus, or even very clear thinking, the intellectual goalposts and fault lines almost certainly changed irrevocably. And whether print was used as a means of liberation or oppression, its central impact was integrative, and it served to create an inclusive if not exactly equal political system.

Notes 1. Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives, BCB 9, pp. 784–6, 791–2, 794, 796–7, 815, 879–80. 2. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007); David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture (Princeton, 2000). 3. Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003). 4. Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.454, p. 69; British Library, Add. MS 20065, fo. 123v.

JASON Peacey   291 5. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (Princeton, 2002); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991); Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, Historical Journal [HJ], 25 (1982): 805–25. 6. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, HM 22039; BL, Harleian MS 4931, fo. 87v. 7. Martin Parker, A True Subjects Wish (London, 1640). 8. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations (Oxford, 1973), 495–6; David Como, ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, Past and Present [P&P], 196 (2007): 37–82. 9. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper (Oxford, 1996); Thomas Cogswell, ‘John Felton, Popular Political Culture and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham’, HJ, 49 (2006): 357–85; Alastair Bellany, ‘The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, P&P, 200 (2008): 37–76. 10. Ethan Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’, Journal of British Studies, 36 (1997): 4–34. 11. A.  N. B.  Cotton, ‘John Dillingham, Journalist of the Middle Group’, English Historical Review, 93 (1978): 817–34. 12. Michael Mendle, ‘De Facto Freedom, de Facto Authority: Press and Parliament, 1640–1643’, HJ, 38 (1995): 307–32. 13. Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor, the Water Poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford, 1994); Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers (Aldershot, 2004), 64–131, 153–8, 192. 14. Ian Gentles, ‘London Levellers in the English Revolution: The Chidleys and their Circle’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 29 (1978): 281–309. 15. Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). 16. Henry Cary, Memorials of the Great Civil War (London, 1842), 293; A Scourge for Paper-Persecutors (London, 1625), 2. 17. Antony House, Cornwall, BC/24/2, fo. 65; Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World (London, 1985); The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, 1659–1661, ed. William Lewis Sachse, Camden Society, 3rd series, 91 (London, 1961). 18. Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge (Manchester, 2001); The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1847–60), VI, 292. 19. Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire:  A  New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 303, 369, 459. 20. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002); Peter Lake, ‘The Politics of Popularity and the Public Sphere: The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I Defends Itself ’, in Lake and Pincus (eds.), Public Sphere, 59–94; Michael Braddick, ‘Mobilisation, Anxiety and Creativity in England during the 1640s’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality (Exeter, 2008), 175–94. 21. David Cressy, ‘The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642’, HJ, 45 (2002): 251–79. 22. Zaret, Origins, 217–65. 23. Shropshire Archives, 212/364/72a; Antony House, BC/24/2, fo. 63. 24. Edward Dering, A Collection of Speeches (London, 1642), 109. 25. Jason Peacey, ‘Print Culture and Political Lobbying during the English Civil Wars’, Parliamentary History, 26 (2007): 30–48; Jason Peacey, ‘Royalist News, Parliamentary Debates and Political Accountability, 1640–60’, Parliamentary History, 26 (2007): 328–45;

292   The Revolution in Print Alan Cromartie, ‘The Printing of Parliamentary Speeches, November 1640–July 1642’, HJ, 33 (1990): 23–44; Jason Peacey, ‘Sir Edward Dering, Popularity and the Public, 1640–1644’, HJ, 54 (2011): 955–83; Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013), chaps. 5–6. 26. Jason Peacey, ‘The Exploitation of Captured Royal Correspondence and Anglo-Scottish Relations in the British Civil Wars, 1645–6’, Scottish Historical Review, 79 (2000): 213–32. 27. A List of the Names (London, 1648); Mercurius Britanicus, 28 (18–25 March 1644), 215. 28. Zaret, Origins, 240–50; Peacey, Common Politics, chaps. 7–11; Jason Peacey, ‘The People of the Agreements’, in Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon (eds.), The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke, 2012), 50–75. 29. Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005). 30. Geoff Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, in Jason McElligott (ed.), Fear, Exclusion and Revolution (Aldershot, 2006), 67–90; Northamptonshire RO, IC 353. 31. Essex RO, D/DQs18, fo. 70v; Jason Peacey, ‘Reporting a Revolution: A Failed Propaganda Campaign’, in Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001), 161–80. 32. Peacey, Politicians, 158, 194–200. 33. Intelligencer, 1 (31 August 1663); Kemp, ‘L’Estrange’, 67–90; Observator, 1 (13 April 1681). 34. Peacey, Politicians, 143–5, 152, 157–8, 296. 35. Peacey, Politicians, 132–62. 36. Peacey, Politicians, 145–61. 37. Anthony Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’, HJ, 41 (1998): 625–51. 38. Peacey, Politicians, 95–131, 163–302. 39. Peacey, Politicians, 161, 193, 227–30, 269–70.

Further Reading Como, David, ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, Past and Present, 196 (2007): 37–82. Cressy, David, ‘The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002): 251–279. Cromartie, Alan, ‘The Printing of Parliamentary Speeches, November 1640–July 1642’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990): 23–44. Hughes, Ann, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). Lake, Peter and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). Peacey, Jason, Politicians and Pamphleteers (Aldershot, 2004). Peacey, Jason, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013). Peacey, Jason, ‘Print Culture and Political Lobbying during the English Civil Wars’, Parliamentary History, 26 (2007): 30–48. Peacey, Jason, ‘Reporting a Revolution: A Failed Propaganda Campaign’, in Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001), 161–180. Peacey, Jason, ‘Royalist News, Parliamentary Debates and Political Accountability, 1640–60’, Parliamentary History, 26 (2007): 328–345. Peacey, Jason, ‘Sir Edward Dering, Popularity and the Public, 1640–1644’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011): 955–983.

JASON Peacey   293 Peters, Kate, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005). Raymond, Joad, The Invention of the Newspaper (Oxford, 1996). Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003). Zaret, David, Origins of Democratic Culture (Princeton, 2000).

Chapter 17

State and So c i et y i n t h e E nglish Revolu t i on Stephen K. Roberts

Historical accounts of local government in England and Wales during the English revolution were most prolific in a twenty-year period after 1966, a year which saw the publication of a highly influential book by Alan Everitt on Kent. The context of these local studies was almost invariably the county, which offered to each researcher in a generation of Ph.D. students a focus, a manageable corpus of records, and a sense of personal proprietorship. Many of these studies sought to test the idea of ‘localism’, the idea that local society was characterized by a dominant aversion to, or lack of interest in, events unfolding in London or the royal court. Many also sought to refine or to test the notion of the county as a focus of primary cultural and governmental loyalty for the politically active, an idea summarized in the phrase ‘county community’ and associated strongly with Everitt and his work on Kent. By the 1980s both these concepts had been tested to destruction, as historians became convinced that neither localism nor the county community held a general validity.1 For all the conceptual shortcomings and ruptures, however, this was a most productive period of scholarly research. Those studies of the period with an explicit focus on local government tended to be preoccupied with structures, concerned with how the system worked. There was also interest in exploring the relationship between the government of the localities and the directive bodies in Whitehall or the palace of Westminster, in which idioms appropriate to the state in the modern, developed world were deployed. There was thus some debate as to whether or not changes in governing local communities should be described as ‘centralizing’, in which the Major Generals of the Cromwellian Protectorate were seen as the most interventionist of superintendents.2 Underlying these dominant questions of structures and systems lay a tacit assumption that government was something imposed on the people, in the interests of control, either control by those in power in London, or by those in the most important and authoritative local offices. Since the 1980s, historians have adopted concepts that are more subtle and more sensitive to local initiative and self-determination. Power in this period is now seen less as something imposed,

STEPHEN K. Roberts   295 government less as something done to people, and more as something negotiated between those governed and those in authority. This corrective to the purely structural approach restores the experience of the people in local communities to the narrative, and is a reminder of the investment of time, energy, and loyalty by a substantial swathe of citizens, townspeople, and countryfolk in attempts to sustain effective and tolerable local governance. In December 1641, the House of Commons presented to the king a lengthy and detailed petition of grievances and proposed remedies, the Grand Remonstrance.3 It was a comprehensive review of the ills of the kingdom, and conformed to contemporary perceptions in making no distinction between local affairs and national ones. Even so, many grievances strike us as essentially local in their impact. The levying of ship money and other non-parliamentary taxes and levies, the disarming of county trained bands, the exactions by a range of agents (including those minor figures such as clerks of the market, saltpetre-men, and monopolists, whose only significance as irritants was local) acting on the authority of the privy council and a number of ‘new judicatories [law courts] erected without law’ were declared to be among the most oppressive. The parliament-men were able to include in the Remonstrance a review of how prerogative courts had already been thrown down by legislation, and looked forward to the suppression of ‘illegal grievances and exactions’ in the courts of quarter sessions and assizes by juries, magistrates, and sheriffs. The problem was seen as one of innovation; the remedy the conservative one of restoration to wonted courses of government. In the years that followed, civil war notwithstanding, progress was made in a number of the areas identified for remedy in the Remonstrance. But even more than the call for speedy and cheap justice enshrined in its paragraph 140, the return of local government to traditional ways proved an impossible course to follow, and the following years saw extensive innovation and heavier demands on the people by the state, in the name of parliament but also in that of the king. These demands and burdens, how they were mediated through local communities, and the variety of responses they provoked, can be discussed with reference to the concepts of participation, representativeness, and reaction: political, administrative, and cultural.

The Burden of the State Any discussion of the quality and experience of local government must be set against the background of the massively increased financial demands of the state on the propertied. The creation of field armies and the management of the war effort on land against the king were complemented by parliament’s success in winning over the navy from the king’s party and pledging itself to satisfy the persistent demands by mercantile interests for the commercial fleet to be effectively protected at sea by a force funded from parliamentary taxation. Efforts to fund this demanding programme began with appeals by parliament for voluntary contributions, among them the ‘weekly pay’ and subscriptions

296   State and Society in the English Revolution on the ‘Propositions’ of July 1642. Such genuine voluntarism which had marked these early expedients quickly gave way to an urgency which made them ineluctable taxes in all but name. From February 1643 the principle of the weekly assessment, a direct tax, was established, and with various modifications became the mainstay of direct parliamentary taxation thereafter. The amount to be raised was enshrined in each ordinance, with a sum allocated to each county. Tax commissioners would then parcel up the county total according to the sub-divisions of the shire, the hundreds, lathes, or wapentakes, and set the amount on each parish. Below that, in a variety of practices across the country, parishioners would either allocate among themselves the sum expected from them, in a process which necessarily demanded local negotiation and placed a heavy burden of responsibility on hundredal and parish constables; or be visited by agents of the county committees. The proceeds of two mainstays of parliamentarian taxation, both established by legislation in 1643, added to the flow of revenue from the localities. Between 1643 and 1659, the sequestration of the estates of parliament’s enemies, whereby the state enjoyed the rents and other revenues arising from property, raised £1.8 million, and the excise, a regressive tax on consumption, raised just over £5 million. Dwarfing these was the assessment, which brought in nearly £12.2 million, and was thus easily the most burdensome tax on local communities.4 The heavy weight of the assessment is well recorded in every county, and was a constant theme in petitions and complaints from local communities towards the seat of government in London. The plight of Thomas Warde, a yeoman of Allesley, near Coventry, who complained in 1644 to the earl of Denbigh, a parliamentarian general, can be taken as speaking for thousands of small proprietors: ‘I have not received any rent this three quarters of this yeare, and I am not able to subsist. I have allowed fifty pounds a yeare out of a hundred for the weekly tax, and now my land is throne up into my owne hand, and noe body will take it of me.’5 There were many corporate complaints as well as individual ones. Local political leaders petitioned against not only the burden, but also against the perceived inequality of one county’s share as against another’s, as when the standing committee of Devon complained that their weekly assessment in 1647 ‘was above three times more than all the dominion of Wales or more than of eight counties of this kingdom’.6 The heavier weight of the state was felt in maritime communities. The merchants and shipowners were faced with fresh parliamentary customs duties, for example on coal and a new levy to combat piracy, while the principle established in 1640, that customs duties were granted by parliament and used only to finance the navy was quickly blurred, as certain customs revenues were deployed to fund port town garrisons. Those without property were liable to impressment in the expanding naval fleet. Assessment, excise, and sequestration all brought with them the need for collections and collectors in town and country. But what appear as the dictates of central government, if judged on the texts of the uncompromising acts, ordinances, and proclamations of parliaments and councils of state, come across to us as a never-ending process of local negotiation if considered on the narrative records of collectors and local agents. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the counties of Wales, where

STEPHEN K. Roberts   297 the management of church lands added to the local administrative burden throughout the 1650s. A sample of over fifty individual collectors, committee-men, and other agents of the state in Pembrokeshire reveals how every year there was a shake of the kaleidoscope of local government personnel and a constant return to local negotiations. Among the activities subject to these processes were the farming and letting of parish tithes and glebe, both to individuals and to parishioners collectively; the collection of rents of sequestered manors and livings; the paying of salaries to clergy and ‘fifths’ to clergy wives and widows; the settling of artisans’ bills for church repairs; the collection of excise and the management of estates acquired by absentee politicians, not to mention the collection of the ever-demanding weekly or monthly assessment. As one of them put it to his later interlocutors, much local business depended on ‘care, trust and well manadgment’.7

Participation It is a matter of continuing debate whether the English revolution widened or narrowed local participation in government. One of the difficulties in reaching a judgement on the question arises from the distorting impact of new or revived institutions called into being by both sides in the conflict of the first civil war as a way of establishing rival and parallel structures to those controlled by the enemy. On the parliamentary side, the defining institution of the English revolution was the committee. A well-known and often imitated contemporary parodic litany associated the committees of the countryside with sectarian religion and the parliamentarian dominance of London: From an extempore prayer and a godly ditty, From the churlish government of a city, From the power of a country committee, Libera nos, Domine.8

The word ‘committee’ was applied to both the collective group and to the individual member who attended its meetings, and was a familiar, time-honoured device at Westminster for progressing parliamentary business. In naval administration, parliament’s navy committee, dealing with a large but just about manageable number of agents in port towns, kept control of matters of supply, personnel, and shipping movements. Away from the seaports, more complex structures developed. Committees in the provinces, formed of local partisans, were the logical extension of the gatherings of MPs in London locations outside the palace of Westminster, an expedient forced on them by the king’s botched attempt at arresting five parliament-men and one peer in January 1642. Parliament’s militia ordinance, which aimed to transfer authority over county trained bands from king to parliament, was the earliest legislative attempt at establishing a rival structure, using the well-recognized terminology of lords lieutenant and deputies to describe the managers of the county forces it authorized. Thereafter, successive

298   State and Society in the English Revolution parliamentary ordinances subjected the local committees, the most protean of expedients, to a process of continuous revision, expansion, and adaptation. The fragmentary quality of surviving source material has rather tended to influence the framing of studies of local committees in terms of the legislation which shaped them and the records of nominations to serve on them.9 The pioneer study of committees in Wales, first published in 1954, looked at not a single shire but all the counties, in a bold synthesis based primarily on the ordinances and the names of committee-men they contained.10 But official nominations to a committee bore little relationship to community activism. Almost invariably, the committee of a given county was formed of a core, a bedrock of local support, often visible even before the summer of 1642, at assizes and quarter sessions in county towns. Here, when the influential in local society flocked to transact business, hear sermons, serve on juries, present local grievances, and see justice dispensed, the courts provided a theatrical backdrop for public demonstrations, as at Hereford assizes in August 1642, when a crowd believed by parliamentarians to have been urged on by the leading royalist gentry known, in an echo of medieval chivalric symbolism, as the ‘Nine Worthies’, forced the summer assizes.11 The core of support often remained essentially the same in size and composition regardless of legislation that established separate committees to wrest control of the county militia, to supervise the assessment, and to direct sequestrations. A similar pattern was visible in counties under the control of the king, where commissioners (citing their authority as the king’s Commission of Array, a typically Caroline use of medieval precedent), imposed taxation on parishes on a monthly basis, arrested refusers and defaulters, and heard appeals on rating disputes judged by assessors. The royalist local administration was a curious fusion of military hierarchy and the traditional civilian county and parish structure, just as novel in practice as the rival committees appointed by parliamentary ordinance.12 On both sides there was resort to the most readily available instruments of governance. The lists of county committee-men nominated in successive waves of parliamentary ordinances are an eloquent testimony to the apparent expansion of local rule during the revolution. Yet to be set against this impression of added dimensions are a number of contrary indications suggesting elements of continuity with the past. Most of those MPs in the Long Parliament from minor gentry, mercantile, or legal backgrounds had been named to local commissions out of chancery or exchequer before 1640, so had served as sheriffs, subsidy-men, commissioners for charitable uses, commissioners of sewers, and the like, indicating how ubiquitous experience in local governance was. During the 1640s, there was a near collapse in some regions of the pre-civil institutions of governance, so that committee-men and sequestrators supplanted head constables and treasurers of the county rate rather than joined them in a functioning, complementary structure. Furthermore, it is amply clear from a mass of surviving narratives of those called to account at the court of exchequer after 1660 for their handling of wartime revenues that the same individuals held multiple and often diverse offices. Richard Clapp of Devon, for example, between 1643 and 1653, held the posts of deputy treasurer, deputy mustermaster, commissary of provisions, head collector of the monthly assessment in several hundredal divisions of his county, sub-commissioner for managing the estates

STEPHEN K. Roberts   299 of delinquents, steward of sequestered manors, and surveyor of the estates of Catholic recusants. In Hampshire during the Commonwealth the justices of the peace, commissioners of the militia, of assessments, and of sewers were ‘virtually identical’, and in Kent, Charles Bowles was receiver-general, treasurer, and commissary.13 Flexibility became a dominant characteristic of local office-holding, affecting terms and conditions of service, including in the expanding para-naval administration. Of 204 customs posts in the Thames ports in 1649, only 37 were still held by the pre-1640 tenure of enrolled patent, while the rest were salaried. It may well be that the true significance of the revolution in terms of the pattern of participation lies in a sharper division between the ‘middling sort’ types who had in more peaceful times shouldered the burden of the drudgery of local office, and who now found themselves worked harder than ever before, but with marginally more security, and those who were either victims of war or, indeed, the state. The world of the jury, the committee, and the town hall was largely a man’s world. Women served on no juries, committees, or councils, and even where property-holding brought a woman in a parish the theoretical duty of constableship, she would provide a deputy. It is tempting therefore to consign women of the 1640s and 1650s to a world of passive citizenship or imagine them confined to the sphere of the private, that of household and family, as against that of the public. Recent writing on gender issues has shown how these distinctions are easily over-drawn and how readily the worlds of private and public were blurred. Women made frequent appearances in law courts, not just as victims or defendants, but as witnesses and as instigators of prosecutions. They had an official, institutional role as jurors of matrons, called upon to provide an opinion on contested cases which turned on pregnancy or maternity. Women paid taxes and lent money, as the accounts of Joyce Jeffreys, a spinster and one of the wealthiest residents of Hereford, amply reveal. Propertied women were taxable, and therefore were likely to be participants in the processes of negotiation over tax collection, as was Anna Trapnel, who ‘paid taxes towards maintaining of the army then in the field; and this I did not grudgingly, but freely and willingly’.14 In 1650, the London custom house, which received collections from all the provincial ports, was ‘kept’ by a woman, whose duties were partly managerial as well as domestic. More generally, women commonly witnessed legal documents including bonds, the principal instruments in financial transactions, and sued and were sued at law.

Motivations During the French revolution, the distinction between active and passive citizens was self-consciously and deliberately drawn, by those who promoted it, as a general tool by which supporters and opponents of the struggle for liberty could be identified.15 Notwithstanding the importance of towns in the making and shaping of the revolution in England and Wales, and despite the advocacy of a degree of egalitarianism in print by Levellers and others, the concept of citizenship remained obstinately urban during

300   State and Society in the English Revolution the 1640s and 1650s, as it was tightly defined and conceptualized against the mass of the rural population. We have to look elsewhere for over-arching principles which identified friends and enemies of the military and political campaigns led by parliament, as they evolved both in countryside and in towns. Many who first explicitly and deliberately entered the service of parliament in the early 1640s were motivated by fear of popery or by a wish to help secure further reform of the church. Others were drawn in by obligations of tenancy to great landowners or by ties of extended family, and in this sense the motives of local office-holders paralleled the political behaviour of voters in parliamentary elections. There are few records of how committee-men or their agents articulated their loyalty to the state. Narratives of service have survived as incidental to the process of accounting, a forensic exercise which left no room for expansive declarations during the 1640s and 1650s, still less as part of the defensive statements made after 1660. During the later 1640 and the 1650s, the nearest equivalent of the later French notion of active citizenship, and the immediate binary distinction it implied, was the concept of godliness, in this context meaning devotion to reformed Protestant principles, and to social reformation driven through in their name. Here was an organizing principle of the English revolution. Yet even under the auspices of the Commonwealth and the subsequent Cromwellian Protectorate, both governments which declared themselves dedicated to advancing the kingdom of Christ, the godly were never more than a minority in local communities. At the height of their confidence, after the execution of the king, the godly were inclined to rejoice in the triumph of the ‘saints’. More usually, however, the self-image of godly local governors was inclined to be defensive, their petitions to parliament or the Council of State commonly resorting to biblical allusions which portrayed them as labourers who had ‘borne the burden and heat of the day’. Another, even more general, trope of self-fashioning was the idea of honesty. David Underdown showed how the adjective ‘honest’ exerted a greater hold on contemporary discourse in the provinces than any appeal to tightly defined, secular political rights.16 ‘Honest’ was a term which subsumed other adjectives such as loyal, faithful, godly, and reliable, was a word used between members of a group based on loyalty between themselves, and by definition was always likely to appear in verbal or written discourse constructing a contrast between the ‘honest’ party and their opponents. For this reason, while the word can doubtless be found used in this binary context from 1643, its use intensified from the time of the struggle in parliament between presbyterians and independents, a conflict which quickly spread into matters of government in the localities. The ‘honest’ were not necessarily all who had fought the king, and ‘dishonesty’ was less likely to mean the technically corrupt as it was to denote those who for some reason were thought not fully to share principles of Protestant godliness or sufficient dedication to the cause. A typical ‘honest radical’ in 1646 denounced Colonel John Birch, a garrison governor for parliament, as one who had ‘neither the desire of setting up Christ’s kingdom nor advancement of the public good (both which he hath much talked on and but talked only), but rather his own private interest’.17 When the customs collector of south-east Wales in the 1650s recommended men for service in the navy or customs, ‘honest’ frequently appeared in his testimonials.

STEPHEN K. Roberts   301

Accountability In a trenchant and highly influential critique of the Cromwellian Protectorate, the younger Sir Henry Vane argued that political sovereignty lay in the ‘honest party’, the ‘whole body of adherents’ to the cause, and that ‘publique welfare’ was threatened when the advantages of a godly commonwealth were ‘wrested and misimproved to the enriching and greatning of ourselves’.18 It might be imagined that as the volume of revenue raised in the localities expanded so dramatically during the 1640s and 1650s, so opportunities for the collectors of it to enrich themselves increased. In fact, the overwhelming conclusion from contemporary accounting records was that when it came to handling public revenue, the ‘honest radicals’ were indeed scrupulously honest. Nicholas Field was typical. In twelve weeks during 1646, as a divisional county treasurer, he collected £2353 from seventy-six parishes on behalf of the Devon county committee. After he had disbursed the sums he collected, on the committee’s instructions, and had deducted his own salary of £29, he was left with £1 8s. over. Seventeen years later, he was able to produce his accounts and the surplus, attributing his employers’ indifference to the fact that ‘the said ballance was soe little or small’.19 Such punctiliousness is commonly encountered in the records of post-Restoration scrutiny, which to the disappointment of cavaliers demonstrated only a culture of high financial rectitude by tax collectors, which had been sustained at least in part by accounting procedures that were reasonably robust despite the circumstances of administrative innovation and expedient. The keenly felt sense of accountability to God, a mark of Protestant sensibility, informed this culture. An assize sermon preached in Essex in 1655 explicitly compared the parish officer who ‘set down every week what he receaves to a farthing, because he knowes he must give up account for all at the yeares end’ to the sinner confessing before God.20 From this sprang the sense that local governors had of themselves as acting out the parable of the talents, as servants either good and faithful, or unprofitable. In this spirit of conscientiousness, local officials often went literally to great lengths to fulfil public duties, especially in the difficult terrain of Wales. In the early 1650s, the collector of sequestered rents in Pembrokeshire lived forty miles from his territory, Thomas Michael travelled sixty miles in North Wales to make his accounts, and in South Wales John Byrd thought nothing of 140-mile round trips on customs business.21 In the context of a discussion of local government in Warwickshire, it has been shown how calls for officials to be brought to account ‘united… “popular” notions of equity and fair dealing and more “elite” ideas of legal procedure and correct administrative practice’.22

Regional Corruption It is, however, obvious that no one with a past to hide would be likely to allow traces of it to emerge during parliamentary enquiry or the later scrutiny of the exchequer commissioners. Those whose reputations had already been tarnished by allegations of

302   State and Society in the English Revolution profiteering or self-enrichment at public expense provided no useful narratives of the shadier aspects of their careers for their enemies to pick over. Invariably, the characters from the regions whose power and wealth had become associated with abuse of office because of denunciations of them in public print went to ground or offered anodyne responses to interrogators from any quarter. Among the most notorious of these cases were Philip Jones, the most powerful politician in Glamorgan, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, a parallel figure in County Durham, and Edmund Prideaux, who conducted turf wars against competitors in the postal service. A  number of preliminary or provisional remarks can be made about the phenomenon of political corruption in the provincial context while it awaits an enterprising historian. In each of these three typical cases, the allegations were laid at the door of an MP, and the complaints against them drew attention to their behaviour away from Westminster. Furthermore, it is likely that the critique of MPs as self-interested and acquisitive began at Westminster and spread out into country, rather than, as has been assumed, emerging first as a ‘Country’ analysis of political behaviour in the metropolis. Heightened perceptions of self-interested political behaviour emerged at Westminster and Whitehall during the crisis of ‘self-denying’ and ‘new-modelling’ in 1644–5, and from that period emerged the perception, given traction by pamphlet publication, that parliament-men and government place-men were acquiring offices for base personal advantage. Inseparably linked to allegations of corruption, defined as financially acquisitive abuse of public office, were protests against local tyranny, and here the committees in the counties provided a focus for hostile reaction against heavy taxation and government outside normal due process of the common law. In Somerset, the chairman of the county committee, John Pyne, attracted a great deal of opprobrium, and came to personify the oppressiveness of committees in that region. Invariably, the committee-men were portrayed as social upstarts, ‘a spawn sprung from a dunghill birth’, a classic trope in early modern perceptions of oppressive and corrupt government.23 This was a conservative, time-worn response to a social change that many contemporaries found disturbing, but as has been already suggested, the evidence points to a devolving of heavier responsibility on to the shoulders of those of the middling sort already active in government, not to a social revolution. The use of print was crucial in the widening out into provincial culture of perceptions of corruption in government. Historians have been rather too quick to ignore the motives and self-interest of authors and distributors of the large volume of squibs, satires, catalogues, and ad hominem assaults in print that provide us with most of what we know about Interregnum corruption, but there is no doubt that the London presses, in a complex relationship with the often very distant provinces, exported narratives of corruption from the centre and imported different ones from, for example, places as diverse as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hereford, and Carmarthen. Publication in print in the 1640s and 1650s provides us with the first coherent and witting testimony in quantity that we have of detailed corruption narratives in provincial society, and in every case parliamentary executive authority is a common theme, but with the authors and distributors of these narratives more often than not part of the same narrative, as competitors for

STEPHEN K. Roberts   303 office or as victims, not as disinterested reporters. Print was the most effective medium for an author to bring to public notice the wickedness and folly of specific individuals, but there is a body of material in manuscript, often in verse, composed for private audiences or for circulation in areas remote from the London presses, in which critiques of parliamentary or republican rule were just as hostile but more general in content. As an example of scribal publication, there could hardly be a more stark, binary expression of hatred of new ways than that of the Welsh poet from a Catholic district who sang of Y Cafalirs mwynion sydd ffyddlon a phur, A’u h’wyllys yn ddilys i ddelio fel gwŷr; A hwythau’r traeturiaid a dorrodd eu gair, Cwcwaldiaid, bastardiaid, gelyniaid Mab Mair.24

[The gentle Cavaliers, faithful and pure, / whose wish is to conduct themselves as gentlemen; / and those who are traitors who broke their word, / cuckolds, bastards and enemies of the Son of Mary.]

Representativeness At the focal point of delivery of participatory government in local communities was the jury, the archetype of government by participation but without democracy. The jury lay at the heart of both the judicial and the administrative processes of government. In a court of quarter sessions or of assizes, juries were empanelled to consider whether an individual had a case to answer on allegations laid before the court. If the grand jury concluded that evidence against a defendant man or woman was sufficiently compelling to warrant a trial, the ‘true bill’ they brought in would proceed to trial before magistrates or judges and a trial jury. Grand juries and trial juries were generally drawn from distinctive and separate social groupings, the grand jurors generally of superior social rank to those who tried the cases. This distinction lay less in an imagined hierarchy of responsibility and more in the wider tasks that fell to the grand jury. The institution of the jury, highly participative though it was, did not originate in the middle ages in an impulse towards democracy, but as a practical solution to problems of local governance. The medieval jury had been self-informing, and the tasks that fell to it in seventeenth-century practice were a codification of initiatives it had once exercised with unrestricted investigative authority. Early modern juries made presentments to their courts of administrative and social ills brought to their attention by constables and other officials, by justices of the peace, and by themselves or by lay informants. That was usually the limit of their involvement in the administrative process, which by the end of the 1630s had come to lay a much heavier burden on magistrates and on specially appointed minor officials. This trend is visible during the personal rule of Charles I, when justices of the peace were responsible for reporting to the privy council on the enforcement of the Book of Orders and the regulation of harvests, and when county officials such as

304   State and Society in the English Revolution treasurers of hospitals and militia muster-masters were appointed from the ranks of the minor gentry and even the yeomanry. It has been argued that the legislators of the Long Parliament were hostile to juries, since none of the ordinances that flowed from both Houses between 1642 and the end of the first civil war in 1646 found any place for a jury in their arrangements for local enforcement.25 Ironically, it has been said, a parliament that came into being to curb arbitrary government by the sovereign and to protect the ancient liberties of the people soon found itself curtailing those liberties and setting up a government to outstrip the king’s in authoritarian oppressiveness as well as in claims to authority itself. In respect of the role of the jury in local affairs this is only partially valid. The ordinances before 1647 did indeed expect little or nothing from juries, and they had little to say to the historic and recognized judicial system in general. Committees not juries, summary law not due process of common law, still less canon law, were more regularly factored into parliamentary ordinances. But it was emergency legislation, and was understood to be such, which was why parliamentary committees were set up from the mid-1640s to decide which if any of the ordinances would become adopted into the ordinary common law when the expected settlement with the king was finally reached. There was no talk in 1642 or 1646 of army control over parliament, or of regicide. Though the notion of the king having fallen into the clutches of evil counsellors was the idiom in which parliamentary discourse about the war was sustained, there is no evidence in any parliamentary speech or report that an assault on the common law and participatory government was anyone’s perception or subliminal plan. Furthermore, once the fighting of the first civil war came to an end, the jury began to emerge as part of the process of reconstruction. The texts of ordinances from 1645 began to acknowledge juries and the other components of the time-honoured common law processes. Juries came back with assizes and quarter sessions after the cessation of fighting allowed local reconstruction to take place, under the supervision of assize judges sent on circuit by parliament. The Devon assize jury in 1647 described itself pointedly to its superintendent judges as ‘the representative body of the county’.26 What made the case of Captain John Burley so shocking—he was tried and executed in 1648 for attempting to rouse the Isle of Wight to rescue Charles I from Carisbrooke Castle—was that a jury was ruthlessly steered towards a guilty verdict for political purposes. It was unusual for a jury to be so blatantly overborne in what was regarded as a show trial, and the episode was a gift to royalist propagandists. On the administrative side of the jury’s functions, there was a parallel return to familiar practice, even if it was not so obvious. Juries presented offences and grievances in manorial and criminal courts as they had been wont to do. The surveyors of crown lands commissioned by the Commonwealth government depended for success on local knowledge in much the same way as those who two centuries later were to conducting the local surveys under the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, which in seventeenth-century conditions meant consulting manorial jurors meeting formally or informally. The surviving surveys show that when Colonel William Webb and his officials travelled the country in the early 1650s to make their surveys, prior to the sale of crown property, they found not only juries active in the courts

STEPHEN K. Roberts   305 leet and courts baron of manors but also in county hundredal courts. In a manor in Hertfordshire they even allowed the jurors a dinner on expenses. The national surveys of church livings, conducted in 1649–50 with a view to rationalizing parish boundaries and resources, explicitly depended on empanelling juries to harness local knowledge, noting who held the advowson, the value of the tithes, and whether a parish had an incumbent ‘painful preaching minister’. Not since Valor Ecclesiasticus under Henry VIII had such an exercise been undertaken. Much of this activity was so low-key it has been lost sight of by historians, but it suggests that jury-less local administration and justice were probably confined to limited periods of virtual anarchy during the worst of the civil war fighting, and that the jury, that most flexible and indispensable way of acquiring local information and sounding out local opinion, was resilient. The Major Generals, often regarded as ruthlessly centralizing, intrusive, and directive in their approach to local government, worked to reform and improve juries. In the circumstances of 1655–6, improvement meant empanelling to juries men ‘of cleerest integritte and prudence, of honest and blameless conversation’.27 The brief to which the Major Generals worked was one in which godly reformation was a key goal, and they understood the importance of representative structures in harnessing the goodwill of people of property and local influence. It must be emphasized that despite the disruptions brought by competing armies and their supporting civilian committees, the common law courts stood up very well to the shock of civil war. The arguments in parliament in 1646–7 over which judges should ride the assize circuits evidenced the political sensitivity of local judicial appointments; the county committees subordinated themselves to due judicial process once the rule of law was deemed to have been secured, and by the time of the regicide and the establishment of the Commonwealth, it was the courts, and in towns and cities the chartered corporations, more than the committees, that came to represent the face of the new government in urban and rural England and Wales.

Challenges to Representativeness Even so, the emergencies of the civil war were enough to ensure that suspensions of due process occurred frequently enough, and at sufficient different social levels, to constitute serious disruption of due process. While episodes of genuine anarchy were probably very brief and confined to the desperate circumstances of battle or skirmish, the more frequently encountered suspensions of normality in the provinces were characterized as impositions of martial law. There was no separate legal code by this name, nor was martial law simply the imposition or enforcement of military regulations on those who served in the armies of king or parliament. It was rather ‘a summary form of criminal justice’, and as the jurist Sir Mathew Hale put it, ‘not a law, but something rather indulged than allowed as a law… only in cases of necessity’.28 The main interest among historians has been in the high-profile cases of gentry and aristocracy who were tried by martial law, among them (in 1643) Sir John Hotham and his son, John Hotham, turncoat

306   State and Society in the English Revolution governors of Hull.29 There were also many cases of drumhead summary justice in the armies, as when in Shropshire thirteen parliamentarian soldiers were hanged by Prince Rupert in reprisal for an identical penalty meted to thirteen English and Irish royalist soldiers. But instances of martial law as applied to the mass of the civilian population probably constituted the most significant encroachment upon basic common law procedures during the 1640s and 1650s, certainly more so than the parliamentary ordinances per se. Not only soldiers but the populace as a whole was subject to martial law in areas where it was imposed, and the Commonwealth government after 1649 resorted to it in response to uprisings in places as far apart as Norfolk, Worcester, and Cardiganshire. Given much more prominence by generations of historians than the local implications of suspensions of due common law procedure in favour of martial law has been the regime during 1655–7 of the Major Generals. Considered in the context of the civil wars and Interregnum as a whole, and with particular reference to their impact on local government, the so-called rule of the Major Generals was transient and ineffective, scarcely comparable with the intendants under Richelieu, still less with the deputies-on-mission of revolutionary France. Constitutionally, it can be argued that their ‘cantonizing’ of the provinces was unprecedented, and the high profile of the Major Generals in national politics meant that their doings were extensively scrutinized and commented on. As they were high-ranking army officers, they came to symbolize or personify two aspects of government in the 1650s anathematized in the writing of British history after the Restoration, namely the military presence in the localities, and intolerant and socially dirigiste forms of sectarian Protestantism. As practical reformers of local government, however, their effectiveness was very limited, as their territories were vast, their subordinates few in number, and their period of office fleeting, in terms of the period required to enforce sustained change in either systems or culture. Some aspects of their regime are of interest to students of local government, not least the efforts in establishing a central registry to record the bonds for good behaviour imposed on the Major Generals’ ‘suspects’, most fruitfully in the case of the bonds from over 5,000 people in the west of England. The faults and weaknesses of the Major Generals’ tours of duty were common to those of other agencies in the period: poor communications, inconsistency, widely varying responses to administrative problems, and a varying degree of interest by politicians and senior public servants in London. While royalists and probably most of the MPs of the second Protectorate parliament were happy to see the Major Generals voted down in 1657, their departure was regretted by many of the ‘honest’ and ‘godly’ minor gentry, yeomanry, and modestly ranking professionals from whose ranks had not only the Major Generals’ local commissioners been recruited, but who had formed the backbone of local government since 1642. In fact, the contemporary fuss over the Major Generals and the long political tradition of viewing them as symbols of unacceptable, intrusive military government has rather obscured a very solid growth of the government presence in the country. The increase in government revenue by over 120% between the 1630s and the 1650s, and the creation of England as a major international power by naval strength, had direct implications for the localities, seen in the creation of a ‘naval

STEPHEN K. Roberts   307 interest’ in maritime towns, with direct effects on regional economies and social discipline, strong enough to account for the election of a number of MPs to the parliaments of 1656 and 1659. In this way, the expansion of a government presence could feed into enduring representative institutions.

The Reformation of Manners It was one thing to represent the godly commonwealth in scattered counties, each with challenges of transport and communications, and many dozens of parishes whose parishioners had to hand innumerable means of resisting or frustrating local agencies of government; quite another to impose godly rule on towns. Urban corporations were the jurisdictions where godly rule was more likely to take root. In towns like Dorchester, with a history before 1640 of puritan social action, the period between 1646 and 1660 saw the ‘climax of the puritan attack on poverty and ignorance’. Not only was a free school revived, but instruction in spinning for young people was laid on by the town, payments were made for various socially approved causes, and, its modern historian remarks, ‘for a brief moment in history Dorchester had something very like a municipal health service’, the whole edifice underpinned by godly ideology and a municipal brewing scheme which provided the town fathers with healthy returns from their monopoly.30 Despite this mechanism, the town’s character as a godly commonwealth owed far less to local government systems than to local politico-religious will. Dorchester was the cynosure of west country reformers, but it was not typical. In many other west country towns and cities, there were to varying degrees the elements of the formula which made Dorchester so successful as a puritan mini-commonwealth, but in Sherborne, a town only twenty miles away from Dorchester, the reformation of manners made no headway. Because of the fitful, varying and unsustained pattern of godly reform, seen in the case of Great Yarmouth, where an intense drive against alehouses after 1649 had fizzled out by 1655, overall assessments of the reformation of manners in towns have been inclined rather to write it off. In fact, the later 1640s and 1650s saw an advance in civic consciousness which is partly attributable to puritan impulses, but partly to a recovered sense of civic pride following the recovery from the devastation of war, improved economic conditions, and the stimulus provided by opportunities for towns to acquire property confiscated by the state such as fee farm rents. The customized agendas that towns were able to pursue with some prospect of success during the 1650s vis-à-vis government in London, and the projects they were able to bring to fruition, fed back in turn into enhanced civic consciousness. Examples of such local projects in a survey by a twentieth-century historian of sixty-six towns were the municipalization of cathedrals, the development of libraries, and the acquisition of new charters. Outside the towns, in the counties, the reformation of manners, like the rule of the Major Generals, was a patchy affair. Historians such as Derek Hirst and Christopher Durston have come to the view that both, if judged from the perspective of the godly

308   State and Society in the English Revolution magistrate, were unsuccessful. ‘In the failure of constables to delate [to report an offence], of grand juries to present, and of trial juries to convict, we see the failure of the godly cause to put down adequate roots.’31 To take just one topic pursued by reformers, that of sexual offences, it would seem that despite the long history of magisterial and civic concern about fornication, adultery, and bastardy before the revolution, local magistrates, officials, and jurors were reluctant fully to implement the act of May 1650 against sexual offences. This notorious legislation, with its ferocious penalty of death for adultery, was slow in coming (attempts to pass a bill on the topic earlier, in the Long Parliament, came to nothing) and when it did reach the statute book there was no rush to enforce it. Instead there was a pattern by which only certain magistrates took it upon themselves to pay special attention to this class of offence and in which juries were inclined to leniency, even if the response everywhere accepted the gendered assumptions of the act, which imposed heavier penalties on women than on men. A recent study of Middlesex suggests that a rather less dismissive assessment of the reformation of manners emerges when less attention is given to the formal court records of true bills and trials, and more to that most flexible instrument of the law, the recognizance. When the record of recognizances is examined, the impression of reluctant magistrates and unresponsive jurors gives way to one of allegations by ‘resentful spouses’ cooperating with puritan authorities in a pattern of official regulation of behaviour, by summonses to return to court for further binding over or discharge after consideration of cases: in other words by a further example of negotiation.

Conclusions A convincing narrative of how state and society related to one another in the English revolution depends a great deal on how the enquiry is framed. Historians driven by whiggish traditions of locating their narratives in terms of what was or was not acceptable to the English and Welsh people conclude that social reformation failed, and that the failure was partly attributable to an absence of inclusivity. And when twentieth-century concepts of government effectiveness and efficiency were applied to the evidence, the councils of state, parliaments, and Major Generals failed to measure up. A  different picture emerges when more attention is given to the experiences of the hard-pressed, hard-working middling sort who made government in the localities work. Problems of evidence surrounding multiple government functions by individuals make it hard to assess whether more people were active as agents of government, but it is probably the case that the thousands who were, became more conscious of their roles and more likely to define themselves against others. Representative institutions proved surprisingly durable in spite of the challenges by parliamentary ordinance and martial law, if only because such bodies as the jury were necessary instruments of government, not just hallowed ‘liberties’. The culture of provincial government cultivated by successive parliamentary and republican regimes was notably honest and preoccupied with accounting

STEPHEN K. Roberts   309 and accountability: to the bench of magistrates, to the exchequer, to God. In the three areas of participation, representativeness, and accountability, which can embrace the effort at a reformation of manners and the role of women, in older narratives ignored as passive citizens, the notion of negotiation is a vital conceptual tool in encapsulating the provincial experience of government in these decades.

Notes 1. A commentary on Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640–60 (Leicester, 1966) is provided by Jacqueline Eales and Andrew Hopper (eds.), The County Community in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales (Hatfield, 2012). 2. For characteristic interventions in this debate see Andrew M. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–1689 (Cambridge, 1987); Stephen K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County: Devon Local Administration, 1646–1670 (Exeter, 1985); Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001); John Sutton, ‘Cromwell’s Commissioners for Preserving the Peace of the Commonwealth: A Staffordshire Case Study’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1996), 151–82. 3. S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (3rd edition, Oxford, 1906), 202–32. 4. Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (Harlow, 2007), 108. 5. Quoted in Philip Tennant, Edgehill and Beyond: The People’s War in the South Midlands, 1642–1645 (Stroud, 1992), 140. 6. Devon Record Office, quarter sessions rolls, summer 1647. 7. The National Archives [TNA], E 113/1. 8. Political Ballads of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. William Walker Wilkins, 2 vols. (London, 1860), 23. Cf. the version of this stanza in J. S. Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648 (2nd edition, London, 1999), 107 where ‘country’ has become ‘county’, altering the significance. 9. For a still exemplary edition of committee records and commentary, see Donald H. Pennington and Ivan Roots (eds.), The Committee at Stafford, 1643–1645 (Staffordshire Record Society, Collections for a History of Staffordshire, 4th ser. vol. I, Manchester, 1957). 10. A. H. Dodd, ‘Nerth y Committee’, in Studies in Stuart Wales (2nd edition, Cardiff, 1971), 110–76. 11. British Library [BL], Harl. 7189, ff. 241–2; Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), chap. 6. 12. See, for example, the Worcestershire orders, in Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. D 924. 13. TNA, E113/6; Coleby, Hampshire, 20–1. 14. Quoted in Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012), 5. 15. Peter McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 1789–99 (Basingstoke, 2006), 56–7. 16. David Underdown, ‘Honest Radicals in the Counties, 1642–1649’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds.), Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978), 186–205. 17. BL, Add. 70,058, loose papers, John Flackett to Edward Harley, 6 January 1646.

310   State and Society in the English Revolution 18. Sir Henry Vane, A Healing Question (London, 1656), 310–12. 19. TNA, E 113/6. 20. John Warren, The Unprofitable Servant. A  Sermon Preached at the Assize Holden at Chelmesford (London, 1655), 16. 21. TNA, E 113/1; E 112/566/691; The Letter-Book of John Byrd, Customs Collector in South-East Wales 1648–80, ed. Stephen K.  Roberts (South Wales Record Society Publications, XIV, 1999). 22. Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), 245. 23. Humphrey Willis, Times Whirligig (London, 1647), sig. B. 24. Anon., ‘Hiraeth Merch am ei chariad a ymladde o blaid y Brenin’, in Hen Gerddi Gwleidyddol: 1588–1660, Cymdeithas Llên Cymru II (Cardiff, 1901), 12. 25. J. S. Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces (2nd edition, London, 1999), 107. 26. Journals of the House of Lords, IX. 171. 27. BL, Add. 44058, ff. 40–2. 28. Quoted in J. V. Capua, ‘The Early History of Martial Law in England from the Fourteenth Century to the Petition of Right’, Cambridge Law Journal, 36 (1977): 152. 29. For the latest account of these trials, see The Papers of the Hothams, Governors of Hull during the Civil War, ed. Andrew Hopper (Camden 5th ser. XXXIX, Cambridge, 2011), 24–9. 30. David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: The Life of an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992), 219–24. 31. D. Hirst, ‘The Failure of Godly Rule in the English Republic’, Past and Present, 132 (1991): 61.

Further Reading Braddick, Michael J. and John Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001). Capp, Bernard, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2012). Capp, Bernard, ‘Republican Reformation: Family, Community and the State in Interregnum Middlesex, 1649–60’, in Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (eds.), The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), 40–66. Coward, Barry, The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester, 2002). Durston, Christopher, Cromwell’s Major-Generals:  Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001). Eales, Jacqueline and Andrew Hopper (eds.), The County Community in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales (Hatfield, 2012). Fletcher, Anthony, Reform in the Provinces:  The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986). Goldie, Mark, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), 153–194. Halliday, Paul D., Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998). Hughes, Ann, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012). Little, Patrick (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007).

STEPHEN K. Roberts   311 Richardson, Roger